It was their fourth time seeing each other.

Taiwo had stopped pretending, somewhere around the second, that she was keeping count for strategic reasons. She was keeping count because each one mattered and she was a woman who tracked the things that mattered even when she wished they didn’t.

They had moved, without discussing it, from the white tablecloth restaurant to other places — a walk along Ahmadu Bello one evening where she had worn the wrong shoes and refused to admit her feet hurt, a quiet bar in Ikoyi where the music was low and she had drunk water all night while he drank water too, which she had found quite suspicious, because why will a grown man not take alcohol?

That same night, when they drove to her house, they were in his car, parked outside her apartment building for two hours talking about nothing and everything while the city moved around them like water around stone. He hadn’t tried to come upstairs and she also hadn’t invited him. That boundary existed between them, unspoken, respected, and she was aware that his respecting it was doing more damage to her defenses than anything else he could have done.

Tonight they were on the rooftop of a building his firm had recently completed — not yet open, not yet occupied, just structure and sky and the whole of Lagos spread out below them like something that belonged to them alone. He’d brought food in containers from a place she hadn’t heard of. Pepper soup and bread. She had looked at the containers and then at him.

“Plastic spoons?” she said.

“Plastic spoons,” he confirmed.

“You brought me to a rooftop with plastic spoons.”

“I brought you to a rooftop I built,” he said. “The spoons are beside the point.” He knew she expected the wooden spoons but he couldn’t force the joint to produce the wooden spoons when they didn’t have them.

She sat on the concrete edge and ate pepper soup with a plastic spoon she hated above the whole city and thought: this is the most comfortable I have been in a ‘room’ with a man in longer than I can remember.

That thought arrived and she noted it and set it aside immediately, she didn’t want to hold it too long for it not to hurt her.

The conversation had been easy for the first hour. That was the dangerous thing about him — he was easy to talk to and it snuck up on you. It feeling like nothing was actually everything. He talked about the building they were sitting on — the engineering team problems, the insistence on no compromises, the challenge of the rooftop garden that the client had wanted and that had required three redesigns. She listened and asked questions she actually wanted the answers to and he answered them easily, just talking about a thing he loved to someone he thought might understand it.

She did understand it. That was the problem.

“You love this,” she said. Not a question.

“Yes,” he said. Simply.

“It shows.” She looked out at the city. “When you talk about it. It shows.”

He was quiet for a moment. “What shows when you talk about the things you love?”

She looked at him. “I don’t talk about the things I love.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m asking what it would look like if you did.”

She held his gaze for a moment and then looked back at the city because the city was safer. Below them, the city hummed and glittered and refused to sleep. She didn’t respond.

“I like you a lot Taiwo and I would like to make this thing between us official.” Duro said gently. The atmosphere shifted to something almost intense. Taiwo was not ready to revel in this feeling.

“I figured, but you don’t think it’s too soon?” Taiwo’s response was too off handed for her own liking.

“May I ask you something?” he said.

“You may ask.”

“When did you stop believing in God?”

She looked at him. The question was so direct and unexpected that for a moment she simply held it, carefully, assessing what response to give.

“What makes you think I stopped?” she said. “Maybe I never started.”

“Your father is one of the biggest donors to three churches in Lagos.” He said it without judgment, just fact. “You went to a Christian secondary school. You know scripture — I’ve heard you quote it twice without thinking about it, which means it’s in there somewhere. You didn’t grow up without God.” A pause. “You grew up and decided something.”

She was quiet for a moment. The pepper soup was finished. She set the container down.

“I decided,” she said carefully, “that a God who loved me would not have given me the type of parents He gave me and then expect me to be grateful.”

“That’s not what —”

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“Let me speak. I’m not finished.” She looked at him. He closed his mouth. “I decided that a God who was good would not have let my brother die without taking one breath. The only other sibling I have is not well. Why did he let that happen? I decided that a God who was paying attention would not have put me in a body that everyone wanted to control, in a family that only knew how to love me as a project, in a country that —” she stopped. Breathed. “I decided that if He was real and He loved me, He had a very strange way of showing it. And if He wasn’t, then I’d wasted enough time looking for Him.” She looked back at the city, shrugging. “So I stopped.”

Duro was quiet for a long time. He was looking at the city, not at her, and she appreciated that — the space of his gaze being elsewhere while she reassembled herself.

“I’m not going to tell you your pain isn’t real,” he said finally.

“Good.”

“And I’m not going to give you a theology lecture.”

“Very good.”

“But I want to say one thing.” He turned to look at her. “Just one. And then you can do whatever you want with it.”

“Say it.”

“I think you’re, maybe angry at God,” he said. “Which means you believe in Him. You can’t be angry at something that doesn’t exist.” He paused, then continued. “And I think the fact that you’re angry means He hasn’t finished with you yet. Anger is still a conversation.”

Taiwo stared at him.

Then she laughed.

“Duro,” she said. “Do you hear yourself?”

“Hm-hmn.”

“You think your God loves me.” She said, mockingly. “You think He looked at my life — at everything I have done, at how I have lived…” (at the men and my way of life and all of it — ) “and He still sees something worth His attention?” Taiwo didn’t think this conversation needed to continue. She didn’t want to reveal too much to this man. He would not be able to handle it. She shook her head. “Think about what you’re saying. Think about who you’re saying it to.”

“I know who I’m saying it to.” He said gently, as if he knew Taiwo.

“Do you?” She turned to face him fully. The city behind her. The sky above him. “Because you keep talking to me like I’m a woman who just needs the right conversation to come back to something reasonable. Like I’m temporarily lost.”

She looked at him steadily. “I’m not lost, Duro. I know exactly where I am. I chose this. Every part of it. And your God — if He’s paying attention — has seen all of it.”

“I know He has,” Duro said simply.

“Then how?” She spread her hands. “How does a God who has seen all of it send you to me? Why would He do that? Why would He think I deserve —” she stopped. The word she’d been about to say hung in the air between them.

You. She’d been about to say you. Duro was a good thing. A good man rather.

Duro heard it. She could see that he heard it in the way his expression changed to attentive.

“Because grace isn’t a reward,” he said quietly. “It’s not something you earn. If it was, it wouldn’t be grace.”

“That’s a very convenient theology.”

“It’s the only one that makes sense to me.” He looked at her. “I’m not asking you to believe what I believe. I’m asking you to consider that maybe the story isn’t finished yet. That’s all. Just — don’t close the book.”

Taiwo looked at him for a long moment. She had several sharp things she could say. She held back and chose none of them.

“My brother’s name was Tunde,” she said instead.

It was the first time she had said it. Out loud, to anyone other than Godiya, in years. It sat in the air between them, small and enormous at the same time.

“I know,” Duro said. Very quietly.

She looked at him. “How?”

“Your father mentioned him. Once, years ago. At one of those dinners.” He paused. “He said his daughter was born a fighter. That she came in swinging for both of them.” He paused again. “I never forgot it.”

Taiwo looked at the city.

She did not cry. She was not a woman who cried in front of people. But something settled in her — something that had been standing up for a very long time sat down, just briefly, just for a moment, in the dark of this rooftop above this city.

“I’m angry,” she said. “You’re right. I’m angry.”

“I know.”

“That’s not the same as believing.”

“I know that too.” He looked at her. “But it’s a start.”

They were quiet for a while. Below them the city kept going — cars and generators and music from somewhere, always music from somewhere in Lagos, the city that never fully silenced itself.

“Your God,” she said after a while, “has a lot to answer for.”

“He does,” Duro said. And then, so quietly she almost missed it: “I tell Him that too. Sometimes.”

She looked at him sharply. “You?”

“I’m not a man without questions.” He looked out at Lagos. “I just decided to stay in the room with Him while I asked them. Instead of leaving.” A pause. “That’s the only difference between us, I think.”

She was quiet for a long time. She thought about rooms. About the ones she’d left and the ones she’d burned on her way out. She thought about her brother who had never had the chance to stay or leave anywhere. She thought about her mother who had stayed in every room she’d ever been put in.

“You’re strange,” she told Duro.

“Probably,” he agreed.

“Most men who talk to me about God are using it to manage me.”

He looked at her. “I’m not trying to manage you, Taiwo. I don’t think anyone has ever successfully managed you in your life.”

That hurt. “They’ve tried.”

“I know that too.” A pause. “I’m just talking to you. That’s all this is.”

She looked at him. At the straightforwardness of his face.

Something had shifted on this rooftop. She could feel it the way you felt weather changing.

She was about to say something. She wasn’t sure what. Something true and probably dangerous.

And then he said: “Your mom called me.”

The stillness broke.

Not loudly. Just — broke. Like something under pressure releasing along a fault line that had always been there.

“What?” she said.

“Your mother.” He said it gently, warmly, like he thought it was going to be received as good news. “She called me a few days after our first lunch. She wanted to talk about you. She —”

“When?” Taiwo’s voice had changed. Quiet now.

“About three weeks ago. She called from a private number, I almost didn’t pick up —”

“What did she say?” Each word placed carefully.

“Don’t worry about what she said.”

“Tell me. What did she say?”

Duro looked at her face and for the first time that evening she could see him recalibrating.

Something in her expression had told him this was not landing the way he expected. “She talked about you,” he said, more carefully now. “About how much she loves you. About your brother — Tola.” He paused. “She said you need direction. She talked about how she believed you were the bravest person she knew and that you didn’t know how to let people help you. She asked me to be patient with you.” He realized now he shouldn’t have added the last part.

The city below them kept going.

Taiwo was very quiet. She said you need direction. Direction? “She asked you,” she said slowly, “to be patient with me?”

“Yes. She was worried that —”

“She called you.” Her voice was low and controlled. She was almost choking on angry emotions. “My mother. Called you.” A man she has been trying to marry me off to. “And asked you to be patient with me.”

“Taiwo —”

She stood up. “Stop please.”

“She loves you. Whatever her reasons —”

“You don’t know her reasons.” She turned to face him fully. The warmth that had been building on this rooftop for the past two hours had gone somewhere cold. “You don’t know my mother. You think you had a conversation with a woman who loves her daughter. You don’t know Oluremi Adewale.” She shook her head.

You had a conversation with a woman who has been losing her invitations to parties. A woman who failed at raising her own children. Her son is in a psychiatric facility and she hardly visits him. I am one of the shameful things she has because my name is a conversation starter at every idle gossip in Lagos outings, events, parties. No one wants to relate with her. Her home? she left the backdoor open. Taiwo didn’t say any of this out loud to Durotimi. She looked at him. “She called you because you are a Thomas.” Because your mother is the most respected woman in her circle. Because she needed to put a finger on the scale before she lost everything she married into.

“That’s —”

“I know her more than you can imagine. She’s my mother, unfortunately” She said it directly.

Duro was quiet.

“She wants to use you to get to me.” Taiwo said. “To manage me. And you let her. And you sat here tonight and you talked to me about God and grace whereas, you had her voice in your head the whole time — be patient with her, Durotimi, she just needs patience —“ her voice cracked slightly on the imitation and she hated that it cracked, she pressed through it, “— and I was sitting here thinking this was real. I was thinking you were just — I was thinking you actually just —”

She stopped.

She picked up her bag.

“Taiwo.” He stood. “I didn’t tell you because I thought it would upset you. I thought it was —”

“You thought it was a mother who loved her daughter.” She said it without cruelty. Just flatly. “I know. And maybe part of it is. I don’t know anymore. I never know with her.” She looked at him. “But what I know is that I cannot be someone’s project. Not yours, not hers, not anyone’s. I have been a project my entire life and I am done with it.”

“I’m not —”

“Go home, Duro. I am leaving too. This (she gestured at both of them) doesn’t need to happen again.”

“Taiwo —”

“It’s over.” She said it gently, now feeling exhausted. “Please.”

He looked at her for a long moment. She could see him deciding whether to push and deciding not to, and she was grateful for the not-pushing even as she was furious about everything else.

“Okay,” he said. Very quietly.

He picked up the food containers and walked toward the rooftop access door. She didn’t have the access so he waited for her, gesturing the door to her.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, when she got closer, “I wanted to be here whether she had called or not. I came to that first lunch because I wanted to. Not because anyone asked me to.” He paused. “...and I need you to know that.”

She said nothing and walked on as fast as she could. She knew his longer strides would catch up with her.

He gave her the space she needed, didn’t match her strides, didn’t catch up with her, just walked slower. When they got down, she was waiting for him at the car, of course, he had to take her home.

The ride home was quiet. None of them spoke.

Taiwo was ruminating her mother’s plotting. Master plot. The way she had sounded on the phone — performing concern so long that it had become indistinguishable even to the woman herself. She thought about the Dubai party. The specific guest list. The invitations sent to exactly the right people. The way her mother had been so happy to see Duro at the dinner, like she’d won something.

She thought: of course.

Of course it had been engineered. Of course nothing was ever just what it appeared to be in her family. Of course her mother — who had never once stood between Taiwo and her father’s control, who had sat and folded and stayed quiet through every important moment — had found a way to be useful only when it served her own survival.

And then, underneath that thought, the one she didn’t want:

He said he wanted to be here whether she called or not.

She didn’t know what to do with it. As they go to the driveway of her apartment building, she almost didn’t wait for Durotimi to park the car properly.

She ran up to her apartment.

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Duro’s POV:

He sat in his car in the carpark below her building for about ten more minutes before he started the engine.

He replayed the conversation. Not the God argument — that he had expected, had prepared for, had been ready to sit inside for as long as it took. That had gone the way he’d hoped, actually. She had said Tunde’s name. She had said I’m angry and let him hear it. Something had been moving on that rooftop, something real and fragile and worth protecting.

And then he had mentioned the call.

He pressed his hands against the steering wheel and thought about Mrs Adewale’s voice on the phone three weeks ago. How warm it had been. How specific — she hadn’t said the vague things worried mothers said. She had said: my daughter carries everything alone because she has never been shown that she doesn’t have to. She has never seen a man wait for a woman. Her father never waited for anyone. Please, Durotimi. Just wait.

He had heard love in it. Honestly heard love.

He still thought there was love in it. He was not naive enough to think people were ever entirely one thing, that a mother’s selfishness and a mother’s love could not exist in the same phone call. Both could be true.

But he was beginning to understand that Taiwo had spent her life learning to read rooms, and that she had read her mother’s room ten thousand times before tonight, and that whatever she said about that call was probably more accurate than what he had heard with the ears of someone who had only met the woman twice.

He thought about what Taiwo had said. She called you because you are a Thomas. What did that mean to the Adewales? He was not oblivious of the privileges the name held but he knew the Adewales were not that far from them.

He thought about the Dubai party. The way Mrs. Adewale had personally ensured he received an invitation and had called his mother three times in the weeks before to confirm he was coming. He had thought it was warmth. He was now revising that interpretation.

He started the engine.

He didn’t exactly feel manipulated. He felt — he searched for the word — used as a instrument by someone who didn’t understand that he was already playing the same song. He didn’t need Mrs Adewale to tell him to be patient with Taiwo. He was a willing party. He had been patient with Taiwo from the first day he saw her and knew she was too young for him.

He pulled out into traffic.

He thought about her face when he said the words your mother called me. The way something behind her eyes had gone very still. The way she had built the case against her mother quickly, precisely, like someone who had been building it for years and only needed the final piece to complete it.

He thought: I gave her the final piece, maybe today wasn’t a day to tell her about what I want. She may be right about her mother but she is wrong about me.

He did not call her that night. She had asked him to go home and he had gone home and would give her the space she needed.

At home, at his desk, he opened his Bible and couldn’t read it. He prayed a broken prayer that night.

I think I made a mistake tonight, he said. I think the conversation I had with her regarding You didn’t go far off my plan. The other thing. I think I should have kept that to myself. He paused. But I don’t believe in keeping things from her. I don’t want to be that with her. He sat with it. Help her see that. Help her — I don’t know. Help me too.

Then he went to bed.

Mrs Adewale’s POV:

Oluremi Adewale sat in the small sitting room she had claimed as her own. There were bigger ones like the formal one where her husband received guests, or the family room where decisions had always been made without her input, but this one, this small one at the back of the house with the window that looked onto the garden, was the one room in this house where she had never been interrupted.

She was looking at her phone.

Three invitations had not come this season. Three events she had attended every year for the past decade — the Ogundimu charity gala, the Peterside anniversary dinner, the women’s breakfast at the club — and this year, nothing. No calls. No cards. No subtle mention from anyone of the date so she could ask to be included.

She had noticed the repeated omission — and now realizing the omission had been deliberate.

Lagos had decided something about the Adewale family.

She understood why, even when she pretended not to. There was Tola, who had broken the way she had always privately feared he would break — quietly at first, then all at once, and now in a facility in Abuja that she paid for from the account her husband did not monitor, because if he monitored it he would say the boy had brought it on himself and she was not prepared to hear that said out loud. She visited every four months. She told people she was going to see a school friend. She came back and sat in this small room and looked at the garden and didn’t speak for a hours. It broke her.

And there was Taiwo. Where had she failed as a mother?

Remi looked at her hands. They were very similar to her mother’s hands — small, capable hands of a woman who had learned to do things quietly so that men would not notice and take credit. Her mother had been a seamstress without the glorified label of ‘Fashion Designer’. Her mother had built something with those hands. Remi had looked at that life and decided it was too small, too hard, too much effort for too little reward.

She had found Femi Adewale at twenty-three and understood immediately what he was — the kind of man whose name opened rooms — and she had made herself into exactly what he needed. Quiet. Decorative. Agreeable. She had been so agreeable for so long that she had agreed herself out of any opinion, any preference, any self she might have once had.

Taiwo was everything she was not.

She had known it since Taiwo was seven years old and had told her father at the dinner table that his rule about television hours was stupid and she was not following it. Remi had watched her husband’s face and felt fear and something else underneath the fear — something she had not had a name for then and had a name for now. Pride. Complicated, painful, secret pride.

Her daughter had the thing she had given away.

But Taiwo’s audacity had a cost. It always had. And now the cost was being presented to Remi Adewale in the form of three missing invitations and the silence of people who had decided to move away from a family that could not manage itself.

She had thought about it for weeks before she called Durotimi Thomas.

She had told herself it was for Taiwo. That she was doing it because she could see her daughter moving toward something real and she wanted to protect it. There was truth in that. She did love Taiwo — love that was complicated and guilty and crossed with envy and tangled with forty years of choices she could not undo, but love nevertheless. Real love. The kind that kept her awake.

But she was not a dishonest woman, not entirely, and in this small room with the garden outside she could be honest at least with herself.

She had also called because the Thomases were untouchable. Sade Thomas had not called her in six weeks. Six weeks of silence from a woman who had called every fortnight for twenty years was not nothing. It was the beginning of a withdrawal. And if Sade Thomas withdrew, others would follow, because that was how this world worked — one woman decided and the rest arranged themselves accordingly.

Durotimi was her line. Her thread back. If Taiwo married a Thomas — if Taiwo simply stayed near a Thomas — the narrative could shift. The Adewale girl found a good man. She settled down. The family is stable again.

That was what she needed.

She had listened to Durotimi’s voice on the phone and she had thought: this is a good man. She had thought it genuinely. He had listened. He had asked questions about Taiwo that showed he was paying attention — real attention, the kind that cost something. He had said I’ll be patient like someone who meant it.

She had hung up and felt something she could not quite call good.

She looked at the garden now. The flowers she tended because tending things was the only form of agency she had left. She thought about Tola in his room in Abuja, drawing pictures of buildings he had wanted to design before his mind had turned against him. She thought about Femi asleep upstairs, his breathing the same steady rhythm it had been for forty years, a man who had never lost a night’s sleep over anything he’d done.

She thought about Taiwo somewhere in this city, probably arguing with another man. She had a problem with men, but she still liked to be around them. She always wanted to prove that she was not agreeable like her mom. Taiwo liked to prove she was strong and had something wise to say, probably pushing away any gentleman. She may also be with a man her father’s age who wouldn’t bother about arguing with her but would spoil her with money.

Remi was shocked the first time she found out Taiwo slept with men for money and then she understood her daughter. She had done the same, but with one man who was not so far in age from her, her husband. Taiwo was never ashamed of any choice or decision she made. She never regrets.

She never did.

Remi turned off the light in the small room and went upstairs to the bed she had shared for about thirty years with a man she had chosen for his name and his money and had stayed with because leaving required a kind of courage she had never found.

She thought, as she did sometimes in the dark before sleep came, about the woman she might have been.

She did not think about it for long.

There was no use in it.

Olubunmi’s Note: Do you guys think Oluremi is doing the right thing for her daughter or is this for selfish reasons?

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THEN

Now, there was Senator Biodun Kassim who had a wife, divorced now, three very young daughters, a foundation in his name, and a problem with the word ‘NO’.

Taiwo had known this from the beginning. She also didn’t always want to judge a book by it’s cover when money was involved. She knew how she chose the type of men she ‘associated’ with. She’d factored his demands in. What could be the worst he would ask? She’d told herself she could manage it.

What she had also known, from almost the very beginning, was what he actually wanted from her. She knew. She wanted to know how much of an actor he could be.

It wasn’t what he told himself it was. Men like Kassim were skilled at dressing their appetites in the language of desire — he wanted her, yes, how powerful men wanted beautiful things and beautiful women. But underneath that, running quieter and more deliberate, was the other thing. She moved through rooms he needed eyes in. She sat at tables where his competitors relaxed and said things they wouldn’t say in front of someone they considered a threat. She was young and beautiful and seemingly decorative, which meant people forgot she had ears.

Senator Kassim had understood that about her before she’d finished her second drink at the party where they met.

People didn’t know Taiwo. People underestimated her.

She had decided to let it run — controlled, like a chemical reaction she was managing from a safe distance. She let him think she was useful. She gave him just enough — impressions, atmospheres, the kinds of vague observations that felt like intelligence without actually being any. She never gave him anything real. She was a Yale-trained lawyer. She knew the difference between information and the performance of information, and she knew which one kept you alive.

She had been, she thought, in complete control of the situation.

And then he had put a tracking app on her phone. How did that happen? He was smarter than she had thought.

She had found out, from the mirrored device her IT guy had set up, that he had seen exactly where she’d been the previous Thursday afternoon. Her precious time with Duro, the man she’d had lunch with.

That knowledge had ruminated in her for four days. At first she would hear a tone when she picked her calls and she thought it wass normal but the tone happened again and again and Kassim had called her to ask where she was. She found the question odd.

“Why?” she had asked.

“I’m just checking in. I want to send you a package.”

“I’m out now.”

“Having lunch with your small boyfriend?”

She had ended the call angrily, found this question odd again. Why is he checking on me constantly? We do not have a romantic relationship, ‘just business’. she thought to herself.

Duro had seen the puzzled look on her face and she had immediately changed how she appeared and covered it with a very huge smile which was somehow scary to him that he had to move back. He could see her entire dentition.

She adjusted and tried to go back to normal.

Kassim would pay for this.

The four days were not easy ones, because Taiwo was a little worried about how much info Kassim had gotten so far.

She went about her life — coffee, Godiya, the Instagram scrolling that had started to feel less like avoidance and more like research, one afternoon with Chief Adeyemi that she moved through on autopilot, her face performing everything her mind was not present for, as she was beginning to get bored of this particular ‘business partner’.

Underneath all of it, the cold part of her was working. Organising. Building the case the way she had been trained to build cases, methodically and without emotion, because emotion in a courtroom — even one you were constructing privately — was a liability.

She called her IT Guy on the second day, Seun, early forties, security expert, someone who existed in the margins of the world she moved through and had done her a favour once that she had stored and collected on at the exact right moment.

“I need everything the mirror picked up,” she said.

“I’ll send it tonight.”

“And I need to know if there are other devices. Car. Apartment.”

A pause. “Give me forty-eight hours.”

“You have twenty-four.”

He had it in eighteen. He had now removed the app.

She sat at her kitchen table on the third night with her laptop open and went through everything with the attention she had once given to case briefs — the same attention she had never quite given to law school itself, because law school had felt like a sentence and this felt like survival. She read everything. She cross-referenced. She built a picture of what Kassim had been doing, how long he had been doing it, and what he thought he knew.

What he thought he knew was enough to be inconvenient. Not Scary. Just inconvenient.

What he did not know was everything she had been quietly collecting since the third week of their arrangement, when she had understood what the arrangement actually was and decided that if she was going to be used as a source, she was going to be her own source first.

On the fourth day she sat with a yellow legal pad — she had always preferred legal pads to screens for this kind of thinking, something her Constitutional Law professor had said once that she had retained despite herself — and she wrote two columns. What Kassim had. What I have.

Her column was longer.

She tore the page into small pieces and flushed it.

Then she called Kassim and told him she was coming to the suite.

She had visited and pre-informed Godiya the evening before on the things she was working on regarding Kassim.

Not everything, not the legal pad, not Seun and the mirrored device. She told her part of it — that something had happened with one of the men, that she was going to handle it tomorrow, and that it was going to be fine.

Godiya was at her kitchen table, somewhere in Surulere, eating rice from a small pot with a focus that suggested she had been eating the same pot of rice for two days. She looked up when Taiwo finished talking and said nothing for a moment.

Then “How fine?” she said.

“Fine fine.”

“Taiwo.”

“Godiya.”

“Is this the kind of fine where I should know where you’re going tomorrow in case I don’t hear from you by a certain time?” Godiya sounded worried.

Taiwo looked at her. “You’ve been watching too many Nigerian movies.”

“I’ve been watching you for years,” Godiya said. “That’s more educational than any movie.” She set her fork down. “This man — is he dangerous?”

Taiwo considered the question with honesty she reserved for Godiya and almost nobody else. “He is the kind of man who has done dangerous things.” she said. “He is not the kind of man who does them personally.”

“That’s not a no.” Godiya argued.

“No,” Taiwo agreed. “It’s not.”

Godiya looked at her for a long time. “Let me come with you.”

“Absolutely not.” Taiwo thundered.

“Taiwo —”

“You are a human rights lawyer preparing for your bar exams, living here in Surulere,” Taiwo said, and she said it with complete affection. “You are the last person I am bringing into this room.”

“And you are a twenty-four-year-old woman going alone to confront a senator who —”

“Who is going to be very, very sorry he underestimated me,” Taiwo said. Simply. Without bravado. Just fact.

Godiya looked at her for another long moment.

“Call me the second you leave,” she said.

“I will.”

“And Taiwo —” she paused. “Be careful. Not because I don’t think you can handle it. Because I need you to still be here afterward.” Godiya was holding Taiwo’s face in her hands now and looking right into her eyes.

Taiwo looked back at her friend — at this woman who usually prayed at five in the morning, worshipped at nine pm every night without missing a day, ate stale food and had chosen the hard right thing over the easy wrong one at every junction of her life — and felt something she didn’t have a clean name for.

“I’ll be here,” she said, almost choking on the loving emotions she got from her best friend.

They both hugged, then Taiwo went home.

She had been spacing her time with Duro.

Not deliberately at first. She had let his texts go answered later than usual and declined the standing Thursday lunch with an excuse that was technically true — something came up, I’ll explain later — and told herself it was temporary, she would recalibrate once the Kassim situation was handled.

But then the situation wasn’t handled in a day. It stretched. And she found herself pulling back further than she’d intended, not returning calls on the same day, keeping their conversations to text, giving him the surface of herself, as usual. No one got her inner most feelings easily.

He noticed. Of course he noticed. He noticed everything.

Are you okay? he texted on the third day. Not accusatory. Just the question, plain and direct.

She stared at it for a long time.

Yes, she typed back. Just busy.

A pause. Then: Taiwo.

She knew what that meant. It meant he didn’t believe her. It meant he was sitting somewhere — his office, his car, the desk where he sometimes prayed in the mornings with his coffee going cold — and he could feel that something was wrong and wanted to help and was choosing, carefully, not to push.

I’m fine Duro, she typed. I’ll call you this weekend.

Another pause. Longer this time.

Okay, he sent. I’m here if you need me.

She put the phone face-down on the table and looked at the ceiling and thought about what it meant that his restraint bothered her more than pushiness would have. A man who pushed she could push back against. A man who only said I’m here and meant it — she didn’t have a system for that. She never had.

On the fourth day he called. She let it ring twice, picked up on the third.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” His voice was even. Careful. “You don’t have to tell me what’s happening. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

Taiwo melted.

How was she supposed to respond to this man who wanted nothing from her but friendship and a future? He had not explicitly said it but he seemed like the type. He was different from the others, barely touched her when they were in close proximity and acted as if he would need her permission to place his hand behind her back to guide her, or to hold her hair out of her face and back to the original position. One time they sat side by side and Taiwo had deliberately let her thigh rest along the line of his and he had stylishly decided that he wanted to look into to her face so he chose the seat opposite her. She had found that weird. Maybe he doesn’t find me attractive. she thought.

He had . He just wasn’t ready for any level of physical connection. She knew because she had tried again and got the same energy.

She sat with that for a moment then brought herself back to present.

“I’m dealing with something,” she said. “It’s not — it’s nothing to do with you. And it’s almost done.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not pushing you away.” she added.

“I know,” he said. And then: “I’m not going anywhere.”

She closed her eyes. “I know that too.”

“Call me when it’s done,” he said. “Whatever time. I’ll pick up.”

She hung up and told herself she was not going to think about the feeling that conversation had left in her chest.

She had work to do. She still thought about it anyway.

She arrived at the suite looking exactly like herself — slacks, a silk blouse, flat shoes. No air of attraction needed here today. No makeup. No dress chosen to communicate anything except that she had not dressed for him. She had no wig on. Her cornrows was laid neat on her head.

Kassim was already there. Already pouring a drink with the ease of a man who had never in his life sat in a room that didn’t belong to him. He turned when she came in and smiled the smile she had watched him use on three continents — warm, practised, the smile of a man who believed charm was a renewable resource.

“You look serious,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I am serious,” she said. She sat down without being invited to. Crossed her legs. Looked at him. “Put the drink down, Kassim. This isn’t that kind of visit.”

Kassim was shocked hearing his name from her mouth without regard. Something moved across his face like shock. He set the glass down.

“I found it.” she said.

A pause. “Found what?”

“Don’t.” Her voice was pleasant. That was the thing about Taiwo when she was truly angry — she got quieter, not louder, until the moment she chose not to be. “Don’t do the thing where you make me explain what you already know that I know. It’s beneath both of us and we don’t have time for it.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he sat down in the chair across from her, slowly, the way men sat when they were deciding how much of their confusion to show.

“The app?” he said.

“The app.” she agreed. “The one you put on my phone. That I found. That I have now removed.” She was nodding her head with every syllable. “And which, while it was running, showed you things you had no business seeing.”

“I was concerned about your —”

“Ef your concern!” She said it flatly. “Don’t dress it up. I’ve watched you operate for months. Concern is not a language you exude. You don’t care about anybody.” She paused.

“Taiwo. That’s disrespectful.”

“Do you care about anybody?”

He shifted slightly. “That’s a very dramatic interpretation of —”

“You recruited me. You wanted me to be a mole for you. You didn’t even have the decency to ask if I was willing to be a part of your scheme.” Taiwo was bobbing her head slowly now trying to rack her head. “Or you didn’t want to pay the money for the extra cost, Kassim?”

“I just knew there was something about you. But from the first month you started asking questions, your questions were not really guarded. You were too obvious. You thought they were careful questions, you thought you spaced them out, about men I’d been seen with. What kind of mood they were in. What they talked about. Whether they seemed worried about anything.” The only thing that baffled Taiwo was how he was able to install the app on her phone. She wouldn’t let him know this troubled her.

She looked at him steadily. “I know what an intelligence operation looks like, Kassim”. She insisted on the disrespect. “I studied constitutional law for four years. I wrote a paper on surveillance and political power in emerging democracies that my professor called the best work she’d seen from a student in a decade.” She paused. “You thought I was decorative. You thought I was a beautiful, reckless girl with powerful connections and no particular intelligence of her own.” She paused again. “That was your first mistake.”

Her smile was completely gone now.

“I gave you nothing real,” she said. “Everything I told you was curated. Shaped. Designed to seem like information and it was nothing. You told yourself you were running me.. Eeeeeeeeeeiiiiii! I was running you. I was deciding what you got to know and what you didn’t and I was doing it for weeks while you thought you were the one in control of this arrangement.”

“Taiwo —”

“I tracked you,” she said. “You put an application on my phone. I put a mirror on a device connected to yours. Everything you received, I received. Every location ping, every message, every photograph.” She watched his face. “Would you like me to describe your Thursday afternoon three weeks ago? The meeting in Maitama that isn’t on any official calendar? The phone call to the number registered to your brother’s wife? Kassim, does your brother know the father of his last child? Kassim?”

The room went very quiet.

“That’s —” he started.

“Illegal?” She raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. So is what you did to my phone. We can always discuss legality if you’d like. I have a lawyer.” She paused. “Do you want to call yours?”

He scoffed then sat very still and looked at her. He was understanding everything, piece by piece, and adding up the gravity of what he had walked into.

“I want you to understand something,” Taiwo continued.

Her voice was still pleasant. That pleasantness was a choice she was making deliberately. “I am not angry about the arrangement. I understood what the arrangement was. I went into it with my eyes open and I managed it on my own terms and I was fine.” She paused. “What I am not fine with is the Thursday data. The restaurant. The table.” She let the silence do its work. “You looked in a direction you had no right to look. And whoever that person is to me — whatever that is or isn’t — they have nothing to do with you. They are not your intelligence. They are not your business. And if I find a single piece of evidence that you have looked in that direction again, asked one question, made one phone call, sent one person —”

“Taiwo.” He tried to recover some authority. “You are speaking to a sitting senator of the Federal Republic —”

“Abeegii!! Shut Up Senator. Shut up! Kassim, Shut up! I’m not done speaking! I know who I’m speaking to.” She had raised her voice now because she was getting irritated that he still had some courage to speak. “I know what you did to Oyin!”

The silence that followed was loud.

She watched how he tried to feign ignorance but failed. All the warmth, the calculation, the performed authority — all of it gone at once, like power leaving a building. What was left was just a man. A frightened man.

“I don’t know what you —” He started to lie.

“You know Oyin.” she said. “The girl they found in your guest house. University student. She died in your room when you were visiting. You ‘graped’ her and choked her to death. She was twenty-two years old. No powerful family. No connections. No one who could make enough noise to matter.” She held his gaze. “She died in August 2021. The official story was that she was cleaning your room as a staff of the hotel.” She pause. “Kassim, you killed that girl.”

“That is a very serious —”

“Don’t fool yourself Man! I have the evidence you think I don’t have.” She said it quietly. “I have documentation that has been stored in three separate locations, one of which is outside this country. And I have a lawyer who has instructions — very specific instructions — about what to do with all of it if something happens to me.” She paused. “If I have an accident. If I become ill unexpectedly. If anything at all happens to me that looks like misfortune.” Another pause. “The instructions say release everything.”

The room was holding its breath.

Kassim’s mouth opened. Closed. He looked, for the first time in their entire arrangement, like a man who did not know what to say.

“I don’t —” he started. “I would never —”

“You would,” she said. Simply. “You have. You are the kind of man who does what needs to be done and then builds a foundation to make sure people remember you as generous. I know who you are.” She looked at him steadily. “And you messed with the wrong girl. Girls like me, we don’t fall.”

He sat down heavily. The large man suddenly taking up less space than he had five minutes ago. His hands, she noticed, were not entirely steady.

“What do you want?” he said finally. His voice was the smallest she had ever heard it.

She stared at him.

Then she laughed — sharp and short and completely without humour.

“Are you serious?” She shook her head slowly. “You still don’t understand. After everything I just said, you still think this is a negotiation.” She stood. Smoothed her slacks. “I don’t want your money. I have money. I don’t want your connections. I have connections. The connections you think you have are nothing compared to what I had before I turned 24. I don’t want anything from you.” She picked up her bag. “What I want is for you to understand — with no room for confusion — that you do not own me. You never owned me. I was never your asset, your mole, your source, or your anything. I was a transaction. The transaction is over.”

“Taiwo, if you would just —”

“My name in your mouth right now sounds disgusting,” she said. “Don’t.”

He closed his mouth.

“You want to know why you can’t touch me?” She held his gaze. “Not just because of what I have on you. Because of who my father is.” She watched his face. “Femi Adewale. You know that name. Every senator, every governor, every man who has sat in any room in this country’s political architecture knows that name. Him and I — we have our issues. Plenty of them. He thinks I’m a disgrace and I think he’s a controlling bastard and we haven’t had a proper conversation in over a year.” She paused. “And if I called him right now — tonight — and told him that a senator had been tracking his daughter and using her as a political instrument and looked into her private life without permission —” she paused again, “— that senator would not make it to his next committee meeting. Not because my father would do anything illegal. Because he would not need to. He has spent years building the kind of relationships where he does not have to do anything himself. Things just happen. To people who deserve them.”

Kassim looked at her. He looked like a man who had been told something about the room he was in that changed the room entirely.

“I have made mistakes,” he said. Quietly. The first genuine thing he had said in the entire conversation.

“Yes,” she agreed. “You have.” She looked at him one last time. “Delete everything you collected. Instruct whoever installed that application to forget my name. Never look in the direction of anyone I have been seen with. Never contact me again.”

She walked to the door. “And pray,” she said quietly, without turning around, “that I remain in a generous mood.”

“You’re making an enemy,” he said. From behind her. Grasping for something.

She stopped with her hand on the door.

“Kassim.” she said. “I grew up as the daughter of Femi Adewale. I have been underestimated, controlled, dismissed, used, and surveilled. I have been making enemies since before I could walk.” A pause. “You are not special.”

She opened the door and left.

In the elevator, she was catching her breath. None of the things Kassim had seen or heard were important to her. Except the Duro part.

Her hands were steady. They were always steady when it mattered. That was the thing about the kind of anger she carried — it was not the hot kind that shook you. It was the cold kind that clarified. She had been cold since the moment she saw his data on the mirrored device. She had been cold and clear and completely certain.

The elevator descended.

She thought about Oyin.

Twenty-two years old. Working in hospitality in Abuja. No powerful family. No one to make noise for her. She had not been a source or an asset or a transaction. She had just been a young woman in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong powerful man, in a country where that combination had a known and recurring outcome.

She thought about what separated her from Oyin.

It was not virtue. It was not better choices. It was a father whose name made senators nervous. Was a Yale degree an added advantage? Four years of studying power and how it worked? An IT guy friend who owed her something? The accident or priviledge of being born into a family where enough money existed to create enough distance from the worst of what the world could do?

Oyin had not had any of that.

She thought: someone should have protected her.

And then, quietly, underneath that thought: someone should have protected me too. A long time ago. Before I learned to protect myself.

The elevator opened then she walked through the lobby.

Outside was loud and hot and completely indifferent to whatever had just happened in a hotel suite. She stood on the pavement for a moment and let the night air touch her face.

Her phone was in her hand before she’d decided to pick it up.

She called Godiya.

“I’m out,” she said. “I’m fine.”

The exhale on the other end was the sound of someone who had been holding their breath for hours without admitting it. “Okay,” Godiya said. Just that. “Okay. Come for breakfast tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“Taiwo.”

“I’m fine, Godiya. I promise.”

A pause. “I know. I just — I’m glad you called.”

She got into her car, sat in the back and looked at her phone and thought about the other call she needed to make. The one she had been holding off for four days.

She opened his message from this morning. I’m here if you need me.

She stared at it.

She thought about a man who had noticed something was wrong and had not pushed and had not punished her for the distance and had simply said call me when it’s done, whatever time, I’ll pick up.

She thought about what it meant that she had spent four days managing a dangerous man and a legal strategy and a mirrored device and she had done all of it completely alone and the only thing that had felt like a crack in the wall the entire time was that text. I’m here.

She typed: It’s done. I’m okay.

His response came in forty seconds.

Good. Sleep well.

And then, thirty seconds after that: I’m glad you’re okay.

She looked at those four words for a long time in the back of the car while Lagos moved past the windows.

She had been protecting herself since she was twenty. She had built a system for it. She had made the system airtight. She had walked there tonight to defend herself and privacy without needing anyone.

She was very good at not needing anyone.

She put the phone down and looked out the window and thought that being very good at something and being happy about it were not, it turned out, the same thing.

She had known that for a while.

She was just getting tired of pretending she hadn’t.

Olubunmi’s Note: You must leave a comment after reading this one. I made it long for you to enjoy.

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The days after the lunch moved real slow for Taiwo. She had too much free time. Today, she had been scrolling through IG for almost 3 hours and didn’t realize the doom scrolling was becoming addictive.

She woke up late. 10:33am. Late? Late for who? High Agency Please! I chose this life. She grabbed her phone, immediately opened her Glovo app and ordered food. She ignored messages from Duro. The food she just ordered could take about an hour to get to her. She wanted to get some cereal in her system first.

One thing about Taiwo is she loved food. She pampered her stomach so much that it rarely ever got unfed. Rarely. Like 1 in 365 days. She was also blessed that it didn’t show how much she ate. Her body still held on to the size 10 like it depended on that size to remain alive.

She had moved out of her bed and walked through her expansive apartment, heading towards the kitchen when she got a text from Godiya.

After getting her cereal in her plate, she moved back to her bedroom and turned her second favorite series. FRIENDS.

She had seen Friends, about 13 times, all 10 seasons, over and over again, she could literally say the words as they acted. She only moved to seeing REIGN if she wanted to see some ‘foolish love’ as she called it. REIGN was secretly her best series, maybe because she saw herself in Catherine de’ Medici. Godiya knew this and knew it was best to not argue with her over which was better between REIGN and GOT. Taiwo, who had never finished 1 episode of Game of Thrones, would argue in this life and the next that it was shitty.

She still had not responded to Duro’s text. He had sent it two days after the lunch. Just that —I enjoyed that. Same time this Thursday?—still direct.

She figured it was how he communicated, no calculated busyness to seam less eager. He had enjoyed it and he wanted to do it again and he had said so. Simple. No biggie.

Really? No Biggie? Who was she deceiving? She remembered the time when at 15, after her parents let her have a phone, he was the first person she reached out to on Facebook at that time and he never responded. She wanted him to be her boyfriend, her first everything.

Goke had done that, very well, in the beginning until distance separated their weak foundation relationship that was just on vibes and on them both winning best dressed Female and Male in their A-level classes.

Look at life now. Lol. Duro, Almighty Duro, begging to have a second lunch with the smallie of years ago. He seemed too decent for her though.

Godiya had come straight from the law firm where she was doing her pupillage, still in her court clothes, a navy blazer and flat shoes, her natural hair pinned back, looking like everything she had worked herself nearly to death to become.

Taiwo was in a silk robe, stretching a long slim, clean shaven leg on the sofa she was sitting on in the expanse of her big sitting room at two in the afternoon because she had nowhere to be and no intention of pretending otherwise. She’d ordered food. Again. Jollof rice, fried plantain and chicken, enough for four people, because she ordered food without thinking about limits.

Godiya had been talking about a case. A landlord-tenant dispute, something about an illegal eviction in Mushin, a family of six. She was animated in the way she got when injustice was involved — hands moving, voice sharp, with the fury of a woman who had chosen her work the way discount shoppers chose dresses at the bargain rack.

Taiwo was half-listening, shaking her head and wondering why a Yale trained lawyer chose to do little things, little issues. Did Godiya have a problem with the good life? Was there any reason why Godiya didn’t like big things? like money? Sometimes she got irritated by Godiya’s lowliness. She sometimes wondered why she was friends with her and remembered that she kept her rooted, like if she didn’t have Godiya, she would spiral out of control. Godiya kept her grounded with the tiny little advice, here and there. Taiwo liked to hear them even if she hardly ever took them.

She was also looking at her phone, another message from Durotimi.

He’d texted two minutes ago. Hey, Are you there?

She hadn’t responded. She kept opening it and closing it and opening it again, which was a behavior she did not recognize in herself and did not appreciate.

“Are you listening to me?” Godiya said.

“Yes. Mushin. Illegal eviction. Six people.”

“Seven, actually. The grandmother.” Godiya looked at her. “What are you doing on your phone?”

“Nothing.”

“Taiwo.”

“I said nothing, Godiya.” She set the phone face-down. “What do you want me to say about the case? It’s awful. You’ll fight it. You’ll probably win. That’s who you are.”

Godiya studied her for a moment with those clear, patient eyes. “Is that Durotimi?”

“No.”

“It’s Durotimi.”

“Godiya —”

“Just respond to him.” She picked up a piece of plantain. “What is the problem? He’s a good man from what you described. He’s interesting. He didn’t bore you, which, for you, is essentially a marriage proposal.”

Taiwo almost smiled despite herself. “He wants to see me again.”

“Good.”

“It’s not good.”

“Why not?”

“Because —” Taiwo stopped. Started again. “Because eventually he’s going to know everything. And I’d rather control when that happens. I’d rather be the one who tells him and watches him leave than have him find out from someone else and —”

“And what? Feel something about it?” Godiya set her fork down. “Taiwo. You’re describing a feeling. You know that, right? You’re scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

“You’re terrified.” Godiya said it without cruelty, just matter-of-fact, the way she stated things she was certain of. “You like him. You’ve met him once properly and you like him and it’s making you want to destroy it before it starts and you’re sitting here in a robe instead of living your life —”

“I am living my life.”

“Are you?” Godiya looked around the apartment slowly. The expensive furniture. The balcony. The half-eaten food. The television on mute. The phone face-down on the cushion. “Is this it, Taiwo? Is this the life?”

The apartment went quiet.

Taiwo felt something move through her — something old and hot, the thing she kept in the back of her chest where she didn’t have to look at it. She recognized it. She knew what she did with it.

“Be careful,” she said. Her voice had changed. Quiet in a different way now.

Godiya heard it. She always heard it. But she didn’t stop. “I’m your friend. I’m allowed to ask —”

“You’re my friend because I made you my friend.” The words came out flat and precise, each one placed deliberately, a surgeon with a blade. “Do you remember that? First week at Yale. Those girls on the third floor. You were invisible to them. You would have stayed invisible. I sat next to you at that dinner and I kept sitting next to you and I paid for your textbooks second semester when your scholarship disbursement was late and I never mentioned it, not once, not until now.” She looked at Godiya steadily. “So when you sit in my apartment eating my food and tell me I’m not living my life — I need you to remember where you were before I found you.”

The silence that followed was the worst kind. Not empty. Full.

Godiya sat very still. She was looking at Taiwo with an expression that Taiwo had never seen on her face before — not hurt exactly, something slower than hurt, something that moved like a tide going out, leaving everything exposed.

When she spoke her voice was very quiet.

“God used you to help me,” she said. “I know that. I’ve always known that. I’m grateful every day.” A pause. “But God could have used anyone, Taiwo. He used you because you were there. Not because you’re better than me and not because your money makes your opinion worth more than mine.” She picked up her blazer from the arm of the chair. “I’m not invisible now. I did that. With my own hands.”

She stood up, almost crushed.

“Godiya —” Something lurched in Taiwo’s chest. She recognized it immediately and hated it — the lurch of having gone too far, of having used the sharpest thing available because it was available, because she was afraid and fear in her had always come out as a blade.

“I’ll call you later.” Godiya’s voice was even. Not cold. That was almost worse — if she were cold it would mean she’d closed off. She was still open. She was choosing, consciously, to stay open, and that took a kind of strength that Taiwo felt like an indictment. “Think about what you’re doing. Not to me. To yourself.”

Then, She left.

The door closed.

Taiwo sat in her expensive apartment in her silk robe and looked at the food on the table — too much food, always too much food, because she’d grown up in a house where abundance was the language of love and control in equal measure — and felt the silence that followed saying something she shouldn’t have said.

She thought about what she had just done to the one person who had been stable in her life. She had just taken the truest friendship she had and had used it as weapon and called it self-defence because the conversation was heading to a place whereshe didn’t want.

She had reached for the most painful thing available — remember where you were before I found you — and thrown it at a woman whose only offence had been seeing her clearly and saying so.

That was not self-defence. That was what she did when she was cornered. When something was getting too close to something real. She liked delusion.

She thought about Goke. About how she had ended that by text in the middle of the night, cold and clean, because she had not wanted to be in a room with the feeling of being left. She had always been the one to leave first. To close the door before anyone else could reach for it. I can say I broke things off. It would have been double jeopardy if Goke had been the one to break up with me after the rubbish he did.

She thought about her mother, her weak mother, sitting under her father’s authority for forty years, folding herself smaller and smaller to fit the space she’d been given. The space her husband had design for her. She had spent her whole life telling herself she would never be that woman. That she would never shrink. That she would never let anyone — man, parent, circumstance — make her less than she was.

She had not considered that one could also make one’s self less. That the shrinking could come from inside. That spending years making yourself into a system, a transaction, a performance — that was also a kind of shrinking. Just louder. Just with better shoes.

I will never be her, Taiwo had always said.

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Now, there was the possibility that she already was. Just a different version. This version was running in a different direction but heading towards the same output — She was always running away from something, never toward anything, and calling the running freedom.

She picked up her phone.

Put it down.

Picked it up again.

She did not call Godiya. She couldn’t yet — there was something in her that needed to sit with what she’d done, to feel the full weight of it without rushing to repair it, because she was her father’s daughter and her father never apologized quickly. He let things settle first, he believed in sitting with accountability before moving through it. She hated that she’d inherited that.

But she also hated that she understood it.

She opened Durotimi’s message instead.

I enjoyed that. Same time this Thursday?

She stared at it.

…But God could have used anyone. Taiwo had switched back to this memory of what Godiya had said.

Meaning: you are not as essential as you think you are. Meaning: kindness is not currency. Meaning: the things you’ve done for people don’t belong to you, don’t make you superior, don’t give you the right to wield them like a weapon.

Meaning: who are you, Taiwo, when you take all of that away?

She dwelled in the reality of the possible response to the question. Who are you, Taiwo, when you take all of that away? If you removed the money and the management and the performance and the carefully maintained distance from everything that could hurt her — what was left?

A girl who wanted to just be normal without causing anyone trouble. A girl who didn’t have to always be on the defensive. A girl who didn’t need to have quick comebacks from anything because the world was at peace with her. Lagos people hated her. Lagos women sneered when they saw her and held their husbands tighter, trying to distract their men from looking at Taiwo. She wanted to catch a break. She wanted ease, but she knew the world only responded to and gave space to a fighter. She was a girl who wanted to dress people. A girl who had been carrying her dead twin brother through every bad decision she'd ever made. A girl who had learned to mistake survival for living and had been doing it so long she'd stopped questioning the difference.

She typed: I am here. Same place? Taiwo switched emotions quickly. she could move from one feeling to another. Self-Pity was not a place she usually dwelled in for long.

She sent it before she could talk herself out of it.

His response came in less than a minute. Just: Yes.

She put the phone down. Looked at the ceiling. She knew he had her number and wanted to be respectful about using it. He wanted to respect that because she had not given it to him. Her mother had. Ugh!

Thought about Godiya walking out with her blazer and her laptop bag and her seven-person eviction case and her spine made of something Taiwo wasn’t sure she had a name for. She thought about what it meant that the person who knew her best in the world was a woman she'd just tried to diminish with money.

And thought — briefly — that maybe the reason she’d said it was not because Godiya had gotten too close to something true.

But because she had. Duro seemed like stability. She didn’t want that right now.

She called Godiya at midnight.

Godiya answered on the second ring.

“I’m sorry,” Taiwo said immediately. No preamble. No softening, no context to make herself more sympathetic. Just the two words, plain, the way Godiya had always told her apologies should be.

A pause. “I know.”

“I said it because I was afraid.”

“I know that too.”

“I shouldn’t have said it.”

“No,” Godiya agreed. “You shouldn’t have.” Another pause. “But you did. And you called. So we move.”

Taiwo closed her eyes. “You’re a better person than me.”

“I’m a different person than you,” Godiya said, and there was no competition in her voice, no score being settled. “That’s all. Go to sleep, Taiwo. You should have lunch with a serious man this Thursday.”

“Godiya —”

“Go to sleep.”

“Go to sleep.”

“I answered his text.”

A pause. She could hear Godiya deciding not to make a large thing of this. “Good,” she said simply.

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Okay.” at this point and time of day, Godiya was not in the mood to argue.

“I’m just — keeping options open.” Taiwo continued to defend her reason.

“Taiwo.”

“What?”

“Go to sleep.”

“OK.”

“Good night” Godiya said and ended the call. She had work tomorrow.

She went to sleep

Taiwo tried on the other side to sleep.

Outside, Lagos kept its noise. The city didn’t care about midnight apologies or cruelties of frightened women or the slow, difficult work of becoming someone you could stand to be. It just kept going, the way it always had — loud and relentless and full of people trying to survive themselves.

Taiwo lay in her dark bedroom and thought about Godiya’s words. Kind words that made her self reflect. About the way she had said I’m a different person than you without any need to win anything. If it had been Taiwo when she had said You’re a better person than me, Taiwo would have agreed. She thought about the way Godiya lived — the Surulere flat, the bar exams, the early mornings and the colour-coded notes and the seven-person eviction case — with so much less than Taiwo had and so much more sense of what it was all for.

She thought about the question she hadn’t been able to answer.

Who are you, Taiwo, when you take all of that away?

She didn’t know yet.

But she thought — quietly, carefully, in the dark — that maybe the not-knowing was the beginning of something. That maybe you had to not know before you could find out. That maybe the seam Durotimi had mentioned was not a flaw to be defended against but a place where the light got in, if you let it.

She thought about that for a while.

Then she slept.

Author’s Note: What do you think about Durotimi? What type of friend is Godiya? Does Taiwo deserve her? What does Taiwo think of herself?

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To Catch up on GIRLS LIKE ME don’t fall series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here, Epi

With Love…

She wore the wrong dress on purpose.

The dress was not wrong in the way of careless — Taiwo was never careless about what she put on her body, even when she was pretending to be. She wore a white dress that was entirely appropriate from the front and entirely something else from the back, cut low enough that the women at the neighboring tables would notice and the men would pretend they hadn’t.

She wore no jewellery except for small gold hoops, her own, bought with her own money, which she considered important. She wore flat sandals because she was tall enough without help and because flat sandals said I didn’t try, and she wanted him to think she hadn’t tried.

She had been getting ready for an hour and forty minutes.

The restaurant was somewhere in Adetokunbo Ademola— one of those places with a lot of natural light, glass and low inside lighting with a wine list that required a conversation, the kind of place people used to perform normalcy at each other. Her mother had chosen it, which meant her mother had thought about it, which meant her mother was more invested in this lunch than she’d let on in her text.

Taiwo arrived seventeen minutes late. Not enough to be rude. Enough to be clear.

He was already seated.

She clocked him from the entrance — a man at a corner table. The type you would normally request for, looking at his phone without the hunched urgency most people brought to their phones. He looked like he was reading something, not scrolling. There was a difference.

He looked up before she reached the table, as though he’d heard her coming, which was impossible over the ambient noise of the room. He stood. That surprised her — not because it was unusual for a man his age to stand when a woman approached, but because he did it without the performance of it, without the small adjusting and smoothing that men did when they wanted you to notice them noticing you.

He just stood.

“Taiwo,” he said.

“Durotimi.”

He was taller than she remembered. Or perhaps she’d never been standing this close to him before, just the two of them, without the buffer of a family dinner and twenty other people in the room. He had his father’s jaw and his mother’s eyes and the kind of face that would have been handsome at twenty and would still be handsome at sixty and knew it without caring about it, which was the most dangerous kind.

She sat down then, He sat down.

A waiter appeared immediately. She ordered water. He already had water.

“You look well,” he said.

“You sound surprised.”

“I’m not surprised.” He looked at her with an evenness that she found immediately irritating. “I just said you look well.”

“Most people say that as a placeholder while they figure out what they actually want to say.”

“I wanted to say you look well,” he said. “That’s all.”

She picked up the menu. “How long are you in Lagos?”

“I’m back. Permanently, or close to it. I’ve been splitting time between here and London for the past year but —” he paused, “— there are things here that need my attention now.”

She looked at him over the menu. “What things?”

“Business. Family.” He paused, “Other things.”

The way he said other things was very quiet and very deliberate and she chose to ignore it completely.

“Your family’s Abraham project,” she said. “I read about it. Mixed-use development.”

Something shifted in his expression — not surprise exactly, more like recalibration. “You follow real estate?”

“I follow things that are talked about.” She set the menu down. “People talk about the Thomases.”

“People talk about the Adewales too.”

She smiled, sharp and bright. “I know. I give them things to say.”

He knew what she meant. He didn’t react to that the way she expected. He didn’t tighten or look away or produce the careful, polite non-response that people used when she said something they didn’t know how to hold. He just looked at her steadily, and something in that steadiness made her want to push harder.

“You know why we’re here,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Our parents think we should know each other better.”

“Our parents think they can arrange our lives like furniture.” She took a sip of water. “Your parents and my parents have wanted this since we were children. Does that not strike you as — I don’t know — presumptuous?”

“It strikes me as parents doing what parents do.”

“And you’re fine with that?”

“I didn’t say I was fine with it.” He considered the menu for a moment, unhurried. “I said it’s what parents do. I’m here because I wanted to be here. Not because my parents told me to come.”

“Why did you want to be here?”

He looked up from the menu. “Because I’ve met you about three or four times in my life and each time I’ve thought — she’s interesting. I’d like to actually talk to her.”

Taiwo studied him. “That’s a very measured response.”

“It’s a true one.”

“Measured and true aren’t the same thing.”

“No,” he agreed, “but they’re not opposites either.”

The waiter returned. They ordered — she ordered without looking at the menu again, because she’d read it completely in the first thirty seconds and retained it the way she retained everything, effortlessly, one of the gifts her parents had aimed at law school and she had spent four years trying to waste. Duro ordered grilled fish and asked one specific question about the preparation that told her he’d been to this restaurant before and paid attention.

She registered it.

“Where did you go to school?” she asked. She knew the answer. She wanted to see how he told it.

“UCL — the Bartlett School of Architecture. Undergrad and postgrad both.”

“You’re a practicing architect?”

“I am. I design mostly commercial and mixed-use — hence the Abraham project.” A small pause. “You went to Yale.”

“I did.”

“Law.”

“Unfortunately.”

He tilted his head slightly. “You didn’t want to study law.”

It wasn’t quite a question. She looked at him. “What makes you say that?”

“The way you said unfortunately.“

She hadn’t meant to say it like that. That was sloppy. She picked up her water glass. “Law is a perfectly respectable career.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“You didn’t ask anything.”

“I observed something,” he said. “You can correct me if I’m wrong.”

She set the glass down. “What did you want to be?”

The question came out before she’d decided to ask it — a reflex, a deflection, but also genuine. She actually wanted to know.

“An architect,” he said simply. “I always knew.”

“And your parents were happy with that?”

“They had opinions.” A ghost of something moved across his face. “But they understood that I was going to do it regardless. So they got behind it.”

The silence that followed was not comfortable. She let it sit there and felt the shape of it — the thing he hadn’t said, which was unlike yours. He hadn’t said it. She didn’t know yet if that was tact or intelligence or both.

“What would you have studied?” he asked. “If you’d chosen.”

She looked at him for a long moment. Nobody asked her that directly, not anymore. Godiya knew. Her mother probably suspected. But nobody sat across from her at a restaurant in Victoria Island and asked her what she would have chosen, in the voice of someone who actually wanted the answer.

“Something else,” she said.

He waited.

She didn’t offer more.

He didn’t push. Just nodded once, slowly, and looked out toward the restaurant entrance for a moment — giving her the space of his gaze being elsewhere.

She used the space to think about the last person who had asked her something personal across a restaurant table. Goke. Ademigoke Savage — Goke to everyone, the kind of rubbish boy who moved through rooms like he’d been briefed on them in advance. They had known each other the way children of a certain Lagos knew each other — peripherally, at events, through parents who ran in the same circles. He had pursued her properly in the months before she left for Yale. Flowers, long calls, showing up. She had let herself want it. That was the part she had never fully forgiven herself for — not that it ended, but that she had let herself want it with her whole chest.

He went to school in Boston. Different city, manageable distance, they said. He said.

She had found out about the new girlfriend the way she found out most things she didn’t want to know — through someone back home who mentioned it casually, the way rubbish people mentioned things they knew would detonate. A picture. A tag. The public declaration of a man who wanted his new situation known.

She had ended it the same night. By text, which she knew was cold and didn’t care. He didn’t deserve a dignified break and she also had not cried. She had gone to her room and sat on her bed and felt the quality of being twenty years old and five thousand miles from home and completely alone, because her older brother was insane and could offer no emotional support and then she had gotten dressed and gone to a rooftop event her coursemate had been begging her to attend for two weeks.

Lloyd had been there.

And that had been that.

She came back to the restaurant. To Durotimi across the table, waiting with the patience of a man who had decided she was worth the wait. She looked at him and felt, briefly, the ghost of the girl who had wanted something real from someone and learned a very expensive lesson about the cost of that wanting.

She was not that girl anymore.

“Something else,” she said again. And this time offered a little more: “Fashion. Styling.”

“That’s Ok.” He said and she had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling of being handled with care, which was different from being handled.

The food arrived.

She spent the first few minutes of eating recalibrating. She’d come here to be difficult. To be exactly enough of herself that he would understand — without her having to be crude about it, not yet — that she was not the woman his parents had imagined for him, not the woman anyone had imagined for her own parents, not a woman who could be tidily slotted into the life this lunch was trying to propose.

But he kept not reacting the way other men reacted, trying to feign concern. He wasn’t trying to charm her. He wasn’t performing. He ate his grilled fish and talked to her about the Abraham project — genuinely talked, he cared so much about this conversation, explaining the structural challenges of building on that particular stretch of land, the compromises between what he’d designed and what the investors wanted — and she found herself listening, and then found herself annoyed at herself for listening, and then found herself listening anyway.

“You’re different from what I expected,” she said. She hadn’t planned to say it.

“What did you expect?”

“Someone easier to dismiss.”

He considered this with the same stillness he’d brought to everything else. “Should I be offended?”

“I’m being honest.”

“I know. I appreciate it.” He looked at her. “You’re different from what I expected too.”

“What did you expect?”

“Someone performing harder,” he said simply.

The word performing landed on the table between them like something dropped. She felt it in her chest, a small cold thing, and covered it immediately with a smile that didn’t reach anywhere near her eyes.

“Who says I’m not performing right now?”

“Nobody,” he said. “But every performance has a seam somewhere. I’m patient.”

She looked at him — really looked at him, past the face and the measured voice and the unthreatening stillness — and felt, for just a moment, the vertigo of being seen by someone who wasn’t asking anything of her yet. Just looking. Just waiting.

She broke the look first. Reached for her water. Looked at her plate.

“This fish is good,” she said.

“It is,” he agreed.

They ate.

She felt the city, like a third presence at the table — the life she’d built in it, the men, the apartments, the mornings she spent doing nothing, the carefully structured emptiness of her days. He didn’t know any of it. Maybe he did. He was sitting across from her in a restaurant thinking she was interesting.

She should tell him now. It would be cleaner.

She picked up her fork.

Not yet, something in her said. Not yet.

She hated that voice. It sounded too much like wanting.

When the bill came he paid. They walked out into the afternoon heat together and stopped on the pavement outside and she put on her sunglasses and he fell into step beside her as she moved toward the carpark where her driver was waiting.

They were almost at the car when he saw it.

The back of her dress.

He stopped walking.

She didn’t notice immediately. She had taken two more steps before she noticed that he was no longer beside her, then she turned.

He was standing very still, looking at her with an expression she had not seen on his face before — not the steady evenness, something more unguarded than that. Something that was caught between concern and a very specific kind of male alarm.

“What?” she said.

“Your —” he started. Stopped. “That dress.”

“What about it?”

He looked at her. Then at the dress. Then at the carpark around them — the attendants, the other guests coming and going, the full afternoon exposure of a public space. Something moved across his face and she could have sworn he almost stepped forward, almost put himself between her and the open air, almost used his own body as a shield without thinking about it.

He stopped himself.

“It’s —” he tried again.

“It’s what, Duro?”

“It’s very —” he seemed to be searching for a word that was both honest and survivable. “Confident,” he said finally. “The back of it. It’s very confident.”

She looked at him for a moment. Then she turned and walked the remaining steps to her car, opened the door, and looked back at him over her shoulder with the full unbothered energy of a woman who had chosen that dress knowing exactly what it looked like from behind.

She rolled her eyes.

Got in.

Closed the door.

He stood in the carpark and watched the car pull out and thought several things simultaneously, none of which he was going to say out loud to anyone.

She got into her car. Her driver pulled out into traffic. She looked straight ahead and not in the rearview mirror and told herself, firmly, that the lunch had been unremarkable. That he was unremarkable. That her mother would call tonight and she would say: he’s fine, Mummy. He’s just not for me.

She was very convincing.

She almost believed it.

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Duro’s POV:

He stood in the carpark for longer than was necessary.

His car was three rows behind where hers had been. He had parked it himself that afternoon, knew exactly where it was, could have walked to it in forty seconds. He stood where he was for almost three minutes.

Confident, he had said.

He exhaled through his nose. Confident. He had stood there searching his entire vocabulary for a word that wouldn’t start a fight he wasn’t ready to have on the first proper lunch they’d shared, and he had landed on confident. His mother would have laughed at him.

He started walking.

The thing was — and this was the thing he needed to be honest with himself about, here, in a public carpark before he got into his car and drove back to his office and pretended the afternoon had been unremarkable — he had known.

He had heard things. Not everything, not the details that people whispered with such relish, but enough. Enough to understand what kind of life Taiwo Adewale had been living since she came back from Yale.

He had told himself he would not judge. He had told himself that people talked and people exaggerated and he had seen something in her — at her mother’s dinner in Dubai when she had walked away from him with her chin up and all that magnificent, impossible pride — that he believed was real and worth finding.

He had told himself all of that.

And then he had seen the back of that dress.

He got to his car. Put his hand on the door. Didn’t open it yet.

She had worn it on purpose. He understood that. She was a woman who made deliberate choices about everything — he had clocked that within the first fifteen minutes of lunch. The way she ordered without looking at the menu, already knowing it. The way she sat. The way she grabbed the attention of almost every man in the restaurant. The way some man had looked at him with envy, wishing Taiwo was his date. The way she managed the space between them with the precision of someone who had learned exactly how much of herself to release and when. The dress was a message. Possibly a test. Possibly both.

The question was whether he was the right man to receive it.

He thought about what his pastor had said once, in a teaching he had almost not attended: the woman God has for you may not always arrive already whole. Sometimes she arrives in the middle of becoming. The question is whether you have the patience for someone else’s becoming, or whether you only want the finished version.

He thought about the word unfortunately. She had said it about the law degree and hadn’t meant to say it that way — he had watched it slip out, watched her clock the slip immediately and reach for her water glass to cover it. That small unguarded moment had told him more about her than the entire careful performance that surrounded it. There was someone underneath all of that management. Someone who still felt the loss of the life she hadn’t been allowed to choose.

He thought about the way she had crossed the restaurant to his table without deciding to. He had watched her do it — the moment her body moved before she’d made up her mind, the two steps she’d taken before she even knew she was walking. She had come to him. Not because he asked. Because something in her had decided to, without permission.

He thought about a girl on a garden wall who said I have excellent balance and grabbed the edge at the last second, laughing.

He opened the car door and got in.

He sat in without starting the engine.

Was this the woman he wanted? With the dress and the reputation and the sharp eyes that were always calculating and the wall she had built so high and so well that she had apparently forgotten there was a self underneath it?

He sat with the question. He had learned to sit with questions. It was one of the things Church had given him — the ability to stay in the discomfort of not knowing without rushing to resolve it prematurely.

He thought about the way she had looked at him when he said every performance has a seam. She had not deflected. She had not laughed. She had broken the look first, reached for her water, looked at her plate — and in that small retreat he had seen something he recognized. A person who was tired. Not of him. Of the performance itself. Of how long she had been doing it and how much it cost.

He had been that tired once. He knew what it looked like from the inside.

His phone buzzed. Work call. He ignored it.

God, he said. Quietly, to the steering wheel, to the carpark, to whoever was listening. I need you to be very clear with me. Because I am no longer a man who does things halfway and I am not going to pursue this woman halfway and then decide I was wrong. If I am wrong, tell me now. If I am not — he paused, — then help me see past the dress.

He sat for another moment.

Then he started the engine.

He had not received a clear no. In his experience, a clear no felt different from this. This felt like standing at the edge of something large and being asked whether he trusted his own footing.

He did.

He pulled out of the carpark.

He called Kunle on the drive back.

“How was the lunch?” Kunle asked.

“Interesting,” Duro said.

“That bad?”

“No.” He changed lanes. “That complicated.” A pause. “She wore a dress.”

There was silence on both their sides, then Kunle broke it. “Okay.”

“The back of it was —” he stopped. “You know what, never mind.”

Kunle laughed. “Duro.”

“I’m handling it.”

“I know you are.” Kunle’s voice settled. “How did she seem? Under the dress.”

Duro thought about it. The unfortunately. The water glass. The way she had walked to his table without deciding to.

“Like someone who is very tired of who she’s had to be,” he said.

Kunle was quiet for a moment. “That’s someone worth being patient with.”

“I know,” Duro said.

“Do you?”

“Yes.” He drove. The city moved around him, loud and indifferent. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out if I have.”

Godiya called at six.

“How was it?”

“Fine.”

“Fine like boring or fine like you don’t want to talk about it?”

Taiwo was on her balcony with a glass of cold water, watching the day go dim over Victoria Island. “Fine like it was fine, Godiya. We had lunch. We talked. He’s normal.”

“Normal good or normal boring?”

“Why are those the only options?”

“Because you only call men normal when they’ve done something to unsettle you and you’re trying to make them smaller.” A pause. “What did he do?”

Taiwo said nothing.

“Taiwo.”

“He said I was performing.”

A long pause. “He said that to your face?”

“Not exactly. But close enough.” She looked at her water glass. “He said every performance has a seam and he’s patient.”

Godiya was quiet for a moment. When she spoke her voice was careful in a way that meant she was trying not to sound too interested. “And what did you say?”

“I talked about the fish.”

Godiya laughed — a real one, surprised out of her. “You talked about the fish.”

“It was good fish.”

“Taiwo.” Godiya’s voice settled. “Just — don’t go in there trying to destroy it before it becomes anything. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I’m not trying to destroy anything.”

“You burn things down before anyone else can,” Godiya said. Quietly. Not unkindly. “You’ve been doing it since I’ve known you. I’m just asking you to notice when you’re holding the match.”

Taiwo was quiet for a long time. The city below her did what it always did — kept going, kept being loud, kept refusing to care.

“He’s going to find out about me,” she said finally. “About how I live. And when he does —”

“When he does, you’ll deal with it then.” Godiya’s voice was firm. “Stop burning things down in advance, Taiwo. It’s exhausting. And I think you’re tired.”

She was tired. That was the thing she couldn’t say.

“Goodnight, Godiya.”

“Goodnight.” A pause. “He sounds serious, by the way. The kind of serious that doesn’t scare easily.”

Taiwo hung up. She didn’t want to hear more about this ‘serious’ man, Duro.

She sat on her balcony until the sky was fully dark and the city had swallowed the last of the light, and she thought about a man who said I’m patient like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and she thought about seams, and she thought about her brother Tola in a medical career he hated that had led him in and out of the psych ward, her mother in a marriage she’d swallowed, and her father calling her his fighter every birthday like a blessing that was also a cage.

Every performance has a seam.

“Good luck finding mine,” she said, to the dark.

But she didn’t sound as certain as she wanted to.

What do you think about this ship about to sail? Let me have your comments.

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Go to EPISODE 4 HERE

Four months earlier, Taiwo had stood in this same living room with her underwear in her handbag and told her father she’d spent the previous night at a friend’s place. He hadn’t asked but she wanted him to have this information.

He’d been reading. He looked up over his glasses — the same gesture, she’d always thought, that made him look most like a man who believed he was reasonable. “Which friend?”

“You know him, actually.” She’d set her bag down on the chair nearest the door. Not because she was staying. Because she wanted her hands free. “You should be able to guess. He was at your birthday dinner in March. The one in the grey agbada. Very nice man. Very generous.”

The room went quiet. Her father was deciding whether what he’d just heard was what he thought he’d heard.

Her mother appeared in the doorway from the sitting room, reading glasses pushed up on her head the way she did when she’d been pretending to look at a magazine, her face arranged in the expression Taiwo had been watching since childhood — the one that meant I.. I cannot do a single thing about this problem Taiwo is about to start.

“Taiwo.” Her father’s voice was very low, very unusual for a loud man.

“He says hello, by the way. He has a lot of respect for you. You’d be surprised.” She tilted her head. “Or maybe you wouldn’t.” mocking him, daring him to do something

Her father stood up, breathing heavily.

He was not a tall man, but he had the bearing of someone who had never needed height to fill a room. Femi Adewale had built a business from nothing, raised two children, buried a son before that son could take a breath, and spent thirty years being told he was the kind of man other men wanted to be. He had strong hands and a loud voice and he had always, always called his daughter his fighter.

He was looking at her now like he didn’t recognize what he’d built.

“Get out of my house,” he said.

Taiwo picked up her bag. “Okay.” with shrugging emphasis.

“Taiwo —” her mother started.

“Remi.” Her father didn’t raise his voice. He sounded resigned to this fate. “Don’t.” he warned his wife.

Her mother had said nothing. She was too quite for Taiwo’s liking, sitting exactly where she always sat — beside her husband, close enough to be a united front — but her eyes had dropped to Taiwo’s dress the moment she walked in. She always had a problem with the hemline, the way it fit, and she had not looked up since.

Her hands were folded in her lap. Taiwo never aspired to be this kind of woman or wife who lived for her man. Her face was doing the thing it always did — holding everything in, holding it very still. Her eyes found Taiwo’s for just a moment — a whole conversation in a single look, apology and sorrow and something older than both of those, something that had no clean name — and then she looked away.

Taiwo left.

She had been waiting for that moment for eight months, since she came back from New Haven with a law degree she’d half-earned on purpose, a 2.4 GPA that could have been a 4.0 if her parents had let her study what she actually wanted, and a very clear idea of what she was going to do next.

She could have stayed back in New Haven but she never made it home for herself. She had always had it at the back of her mind that Lagos was her base. She’d moved back into her childhood bedroom and spent those eight months eating her mother’s food and watching her father read and letting the tension build like weather, because she understood — even if she couldn’t have articulated it — that she needed him to be the one who said leave.

She needed it to be his choice. So it could never be her fault.

She had not always been this way.

Or perhaps she had always been this way and simply hadn’t found the right conditions yet. She was never sure which version was true.

She found the photograph on her third week back in Lagos, in the drawer of her childhood desk that nobody had touched in years — underneath old report cards and a friendship bracelet she didn’t remember making, a secondary school ID card that showed a girl with her same face and none of her current realities.

It was from the Thomas garden party. She was thirteen. She remembered that afternoon very vividly, in color, without the filter of self-consciousness that came later.

She had climbed the Thomas’ garden wall on a dare from nobody, because it was there and the adults had told her not to and those had always been the only two reasons she needed. She sat on top of it like a queen surveying a kingdom while her mother along with her father who were invited to the party shook their head slowly in a way that meant this child will not be the end of us. They had quickly moved away from the scene to hide among the crowd at the garden party.

Duro had been almost Eighteen, straight out of boarding school. Preparing to leave for the US for his first degree within the next 2 months. He had looked up at her on the wall and laughed, while walking up to her —and said: “You’re going to break your neck.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I have excellent balance.” she did.

“You are too young to be showing off.” Duro continued.

“I’m thirteen” as if that was enough reason.

He had looked at her for a long moment, shading his eyes against the almost-evening sun. He had heard a lot about this little girl from his mother.

He had heard that she would sometimes just show up at their house uninvited because she got bored at home or because her parents wanted to scold her. His mom had had a fondness for her. Duro being the only child would have been in boarding school, which made the house feel alone sometimes and this girl brought spark to their house. He guessed she must be the girl his mom had so lovingly talked about on some phone calls to him.

“As old as you are, why are you still in school?” she questioned him while still sitting on the fence, assuming he was old because he had beards, a lot of it, while her own older brother barely had a full chin at 16.

This made him laugh a very loud laugh. This girl just said anything on her mind, not caring for filters.

“How old do you think I am?”

“In your late twenties, thirties.” she answered.

“Why do you think that?”

“Your mom is 60 and my mom is 42.” Taiwo had remembered that some months ago, Duro’s mom celebrated her 60th and she had a head full of grey hairs.

“Would you like to come down so I can explain some things better to you?” He felt she could understand that his parents had waited almost fifteen years before they had him.

“No, I’m fine right here.” she needed him to tell her right there.

“What about food? Don’t you want to eat anything?” He said, trying to cajole her to come down from the fence.

“That’s not a problem for me. Mr. Alex already has my food packed.”

“By Alex, you mean my Chef?” Duro asked.

“Your mom’s chef. Yes!” Then she jumped down, introducing herself officially to Duro. “My name is Taiwo and your mom has not said enough about you. I also didn’t need your help coming down. Thank you. What are your future plans? Do you plan to live with your parents forever? Will you get your own house? What do you do outside school?”

This girl seemed interesting, Taiwo thought but he needed to get back to his 3 friends from school. They were upstairs in the living room. He wanted to walk away from the little girl whose questions were scary.

“I don’t have to explain anything to you.” He smiled and turned to walk away.

“Ok.” She followed him.

“Why are you following me? Please stay back. Adults are outside here. I cannot supervise kids.”

“I am not a kid.” she was tall for her age but she was still a kid. “Also, I have never been up here before.” She said as she followed him into the building and up the stairs.

“Mom!!!” Duro shouted for his mom’s attention. “Please take your baby away from me.”

“Taiwo, I need your help here.” Mrs. Thomas had responded as she heard her son’s plea.

“To do what?” Taiwo had asked.

“Come.” she begged.

Taiwo went to her reluctantly, while Duro escaped to be with his friends.

“Why don’t you want me to follow him?” Taiwo had demanded from Mrs. Thomas.

She laughed. “He doesn’t want you in his space. Let’s give him some privacy.”

Barely One minute after Taiwo had acknowledged the space Duro required, she went up to his space. He had 3 friends over, and one of the friends was a girl. Taiwo was fascinated by Duro as soon as she had seen him from the fence and realized that this girl was also fascinated by him when she got upstairs to the second living room.

She ran to him and whispered “Do you know that this girl likes you?”

He wasn’t surprised she had come. “Yes.” The girl had been his classmate from school who he was trying being polite with. She had tagged along with his other friends after begging to be invited to Duro’s house.

“Will you marry her and leave your parents house?”

“I’d rather marry you.”

Taiwo didn’t see the slight in that remark. She didn’t catch. He meant she was the lesser of two evils.

“Hmm. Ok.”

The photographer had by this time come upstairs to get more photos of guests. She had directed him to take one of them and begged him to give her a copy.

She also had shyly ran downstairs when she saw the slight frown on Duro’s face.

That was the photo she was holding now, with the slight frown on Duro’s face. That was also the last clear memory she has of him before he left for America and became someone she only heard about in the updates her mother inserted into conversations.

She put the photograph back in the drawer.

She didn’t think about it again.

What she knew was this: she had been a very smart child. The kind of smart that teachers called gifted and parents called a blessing and siblings called annoying. She had been first in her class from nursery through secondary school without appearing to try, which was both accurate and misleading — she tried enormously, she simply made it look effortless, because she’d understood early that people were more comfortable with intelligence that seemed accidental.

It was during those eight months that the dinner table became a war zone she was the only one fighting in.

Her mother had asked, one evening in the second month, why she had come home at two in the morning smelling like Tobacco and alcohol.

It was a reasonable question. Taiwo had been waiting for it.

“I was at The George,” she said, cutting her chicken like she was discussing the weather. “Chief Balogun sends a car at nine. We usually finish around midnight but he wanted to talk afterward, so.” She looked up. Smiled pleasantly. “You know how Chief Balogun is, Mummy. Very chatty after.”

The table went completely silent.

Her mother’s fork stopped moving. Her face did the thing it did — the holding, the very careful holding — but something underneath cracked slightly, a fault line visible for just a moment before she pressed it back down. She picked up her water glass and put it down without drinking.

Her father looked at Taiwo over his glasses for a long moment. Then he looked back at his plate. His jaw moved once. He said nothing.

Taiwo ate her chicken with so much gusto.

Three weeks later, at Sunday lunch, her mother tried again. Softer this time,— you’ve been out a lot, are you sleeping enough, you look lean and tired —

“I’m eating very well, Mummy, thank you,” Taiwo said. Her mother didn’t have to know she had just recovered from treating an STI. She didn’t remember which of the men she had gotten it from. Yeah, the protection didn’t work as ‘advertised’.

She reached for the fried plantain. “Adewusi took me to Chef KEN in Dubai, last week. Have you been? The sea bass is incredible. And he’s very generous. Very —” she paused, as though searching for the word, “— attentive.” She looked at her mother with wide, pleasant eyes. “Very attentive. All night.”

“Which Adewusi?” Her mother asked, begging and hoping it was not the elderly man.

“Which other Adewusi do you know? Senator of course.” Taiwo supplied.

Her mother made a sound before reaching for her glass of water. This time she drank deeply and did not put the glass down for a long time.

Her father set his fork on the table. Very Gently. Deliberately. His hands needed to be still.

“Taiwo,” he said. Very quietly.

“Daddy.” replied pleasantly.

He picked up his fork. He did not speak again for the rest of the meal. But his hands, she noticed, were not entirely steady. Also, he was no longer chewing, just swallowing the meal. This made her chuckle.

She had felt, in those moments, the satisfaction of a woman who had found the most hurtful pains to press and would press at will. She had not felt good about it initially, but she had done it anyway — deliberately, clearly, eyes open — because at least a wound you made yourself was one you controlled.

She had not understood yet that she was wounding herself too.

She had known what she wanted to do since she was twelve. She’d seen her maternal grandmother’s sewing machines one time she and her older brother visited during the holidays. Her grandmother had let her play with the machines and had hoped that even though her own daughter, Remi, had chosen not to follow in the trade, she could see that her grand-daughter was happy to revive it.

Taiwo had seen more photos of her grand-mother as a younger woman, moving around her tiny shop, rearranging fabric, talking with her hands, laughing with the photographer — and something in Taiwo had gone there, that. I like that happiness this woman has. Quiet and certain, the way only the truest things arrived. She wanted to dress people. She wanted to make things beautiful. She wanted to work in a room full of color and texture and light and call it a life.

She told her parents when she was fifteen, after the funeral of her grand-mother.

Her father had listened carefully, nodded once, and said, “You’ll study law. You can do fashion as a hobby.” He undermined her interest.

Her brother, Tola, was already in medical school by then, already miserable in ways he’d stopped trying to hide, already the cautionary tale she never forgot.

She went to Yale because her father wanted Yale and because she was smart enough to get in and because some part of her thought, right up until she arrived, that maybe she would find a way to make it work. Maybe she’d discover she liked law. Maybe she’d study it and it would open like a room she hadn’t expected.

It didn’t open. It sat on her chest like furniture.

She got a 3.1 her first semester without trying. She could see, very clearly, the 4.0 she could have had. She put it away like a photograph of someone else’s life and started trying less.

The man she’d told about her parents was named Lloyd.

He was fifty-four, African-American, in Lagos for an extended business engagement, staying at the Eko Hotel in a suite on the ninth floor. He’d met her at a rooftop event at Elm City in her second year — she’d been there with a course-mate, wearing a dress she’d spent two hours arranging on her body because even then, even without the language for it, she was still doing the thing she actually loved.

He’d asked who styled her.

“I did,” she said.

He’d looked at her differently after that. She hadn’t known then how to read that look. She knew now.

He was kind for two weeks. Genuinely kind, or kind enough that she couldn’t tell the difference, which amounted to the same thing. She told him about her parents over dinner — the control, the money, the law degree she was failing on purpose, the brother who’d disappeared into his own unhappiness — and he’d listened with his chin in his hand and said, that must be very lonely.

Nobody had said that to her before.

She was twenty years old then and five thousand miles from Lagos and she had been lonely for so long that she’d stopped noticing it.

And he saw it. In one dinner. He had invited her to join him in Lagos for 1 week, that he enjoyed her company and liked how ambitious she was, talking about how he could help such a young and ambitious woman. Of course, her parents were not aware she was in Lagos.

She didn’t see what was coming until it came. And even then — even standing in his hotel room the first time, understanding finally what the kindness had been scaffolding for — she didn’t feel what she thought she’d feel. She thought she’d feel afraid, or ashamed, or at least surprised.

She felt something more like: oh. So this is how it works.

And then: I can work with this.

She never told Godiya how it started. Godiya had guessed most of it anyway.

Godiya Umar had arrived at Yale on a full scholarship from a small university town in Kaduna State, with two suitcases and the energy of someone who had converted every obstacle in her life directly into fuel. She was studying law because she actually wanted to — she had wanted to be a human rights lawyer since secondary school, since watching her mother fight a land dispute with nothing but stubbornness and photocopied documents and win — and she approached her coursework with a ferocity that Taiwo found both admirable and slightly exhausting.

They were assigned to the same room in the first year. They had, on the surface, nothing in common.

Godiya prayed at five in the morning. Taiwo slept until noon when she could manage it. Godiya meal-prepped on Sundays. Taiwo ate whatever was closest. Godiya studied with colour-coded notes. Taiwo read each thing once, retained it perfectly, and resented every second.

But Taiwo had been kind to her in the first week, when the other girls on the floor were performing cruelty of women who have decided someone doesn’t belong — small exclusions, conversations that stopped when Godiya walked in, a collective turning away so subtle it could be denied. Taiwo had sat beside her at the welcome dinner and talked to her for two hours and made it clear, without announcing it, that anyone who had a problem with Godiya would have a problem with Taiwo.

She hadn’t done it out of pure goodness. She’d done it because she recognized something in Godiya’s face — a refusal to show that anything hurt — and it had felt, uncomfortably, like looking in a mirror.

They’d been close ever since. In the complicated, unspoken way of women who know too much about each other.

Godiya saw everything. She had always seen everything.

“You know this is not a plan,” Godiya had said to her once, in their junior year, watching Taiwo get dressed to leave at eleven on a Tuesday night. “You know you’re just hurting yourself and calling it revenge.”

“It works for me,” Taiwo said.

“It doesn’t work for you. It just feels like it works because you’re the one holding the match.” Godiya was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her con law textbook open and her reading glasses on, looking at Taiwo the way she looked at bad legal arguments — not angry, just tired. “And one day you’re going to run out of things to burn.”

“Okay, Godiya.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you’re serious. You’re always serious.”

“Taiwo —”

“I’ll be back before your alarm goes off.” She’d picked up her clutch. “Don’t wait up.”

Godiya hadn’t waited up. But she’d been awake when Taiwo came back at three in the morning, sitting in the dark of their room, and she hadn’t said anything. Just looked at her.

That was somehow worse than anything she could have said.

Taiwo’s mother called her the evening after her father told her to leave.

She didn’t answer.

She was sitting in the back of a car, being driven to a hotel where a man named Ben — new sugar man, careful, useful — had booked a room. She was wearing the red dress, looking out the window at Lagos moving past in the dark, all that noise and light, the city that had made her father and rejected her brother and was currently making her wealthy in ways her parents would never understand.

She let the call ring out.

Then she opened her texts and typed to Godiya, who was back in Lagos now, doing her bar exams, living in a flat in Surulere that her scholarship money just barely covered:

He asked me to leave.

Godiya’s response came immediately.

Are you okay?

Taiwo thought about it. Watched a danfo cut across three lanes of traffic like a man who had made peace with his own mortality.

Yes, she typed back.

Do you want me to come?

No. I’m fine.

A pause. Then: Taiwo.

I said I’m fine, Godiya.

Okay. Another pause. Where are you sleeping tonight?

Taiwo smiled at her phone. Somewhere nice.

She could feel Godiya deciding not to ask the follow-up question. That restraint — that deliberate, loving restraint — was the thing about Godiya she could never quite bring herself to deserve.

Okay, Godiya sent. Call me tomorrow.

Taiwo put the phone away.

The car moved through Lagos. She looked out the window and did not feel sad, because she had been practicing since she was born into a family that had already lost one child and decided the remaining one was too precious to be allowed to be herself.

Her father had called her his fighter at every birthday. Every year, the same toast — my Taiwo, who came into this world swinging, who showed us from the very first breath that she was going to do things her own way. And every year her mother would smile that performed smile, and her older brother would look at his plate, and Taiwo would raise her glass and think: then why won’t you let me?

She had a twin brother she’d never met. She’d been told about him how families told children about losses — carefully wrapped in enough love to make the sadness feel sacred. He hadn’t survived. She had. Her father had decided this meant she was strong.

She sometimes wondered if her father understood what it cost her, carrying that. Being the one who made it. Being asked, every year, to perform the miracle of her own survival as proof of something.

She was tired of being proof of something.

She wanted, occasionally, to be allowed to just be a person.

She looked at the hotel entrance approaching through the windscreen — lit up and air-conditioned and uncomplicated. The people here didn’t care nothing of her except that she show up and be exactly as much as she chose to be — and she thought: this, I know how to do.

Everything else could wait.

Go to EPISODE 3 HERE

The suite smelled like his cologne and expensive apology — sandalwood and something imported, something that cost more than most people’s rent. Taiwo stood at the floor-to-ceiling window in nothing but his shirt, watching Lagos glitter beneath her like it owed her something.

It did. She’d decided that a long time ago.

“Come back to bed.”

Chief Adeyemi’s voice was gravel and impatience. Sixty-one years old and still liked to wear suits. Petroleum money. A wife in Ikoyi and two in the village he never mentioned unless he’d had too much of the Hennessy he kept beside the bed like a nightstand lamp. He had a daughter Taiwo’s age. He had a son at Oxford. He had a membership at the most expensive golf club in Lagos and a handshake with half the men her father had spent thirty years building relationships with. Today, they had decided not to stay in one of his high-rise apartments around Ikoyi.

None of that was her problem.

“Taiwo.”

“I’m looking at something.”

“You’re looking at air.”

She smiled at the glass, at her own reflection. She had learned to do that — smile at herself when no one in the room deserved it. “Maybe I like air.”

She heard him shift, the expensive rustle of sheets, and then the sound of him reaching for his phone. They always reached for their phones when she stopped performing. It was fine. She wasn’t performing right now. She was calculating.

The envelope sat on the dressing table. Cream-colored, thick, sealed confidence by a man who believed money solved most things. She’d clocked it the moment she walked in, she did it that way, always checking — exits, expressions, the weight of a man’s ego before she decided how much of herself to spend on him.

She had learned to be a very fast reader of rooms.

“You’re quiet tonight,” he said.

“I’m always quiet.”

“You’re usually —” he paused.

“What?”

“On.”

She turned from the window slowly, because she’d learned that too — the power of slowness, of never rushing toward anything a man said. A man would wait.

She looked at him from across the room: the reading glasses he wore when he thought she wasn’t watching, the belly his suits hid like a state secret, the way his eyes moved over her like she was something he’d acquired and was thinking “Have I paid too much?”

“On,” she repeated. “Like a light switch?” she wanted to be offended. She chose to be offended. Offence was the next thing to choose for men like these. they always thought to disrespect women, they thought that an agreement that included body in exchange for money warranted being talked down on. She knew how to play her cards right to seem offended so she could get an apology.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it?”

He took his glasses off. “Come here, Taiwo.”

She came — not because he asked, she was only done with the window. She moved to the dressing table, sat on the velvet stool, and began removing the earrings he’d given her two months ago. Gold things. Large and ostentatious in the way of men who had always had money and still needed you to know it. She set them beside the envelope.

“How is your mother?” he said.

“Alive.”

“And your father?”

She met his eyes in the mirror. “What is this? Have you suddenly become a therapist who needs to know the beginning of my downward spiral?”

He shrugged, too casual for the question. “I know Femi Adewale. Known him a long time.” A pause. “He was at the Civic dinner last week. He looked —” another pause, “— tired.”

Taiwo said nothing.

“He’s a good man, your father.”

“Yes,” she said. “He is.”

She picked up the envelope. Felt its weight. Set it back down and slid out only what they had agreed — not a dollar more — then tucked it into the Bottega clutch beside her.

She stood. Found her dress where she’d left it three hours ago and began to get dressed like she had somewhere more important to be, even though she didn’t.

“Taiwo.”

“What?”

“The rest is for you. Take it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She zipped the dress. “Because the last man who gave me more than we agreed started calling me four times a day and sending his driver to wait outside my building.” She picked up the clutch and turned to face him fully. “I had to move apartments because of him. I like my new apartment. I don’t want to move again.”

Chief Adeyemi stared at her. Then he laughed — a real one, surprised out of him.

“My youngest daughter is your age,” he said.

“I remind you of your daughter?” Taiwo laughed loud at what this implied.

“Does that not —”Chief held his tongue.

“No.” She tilted her head. “If it bothered you, you wouldn’t be here now. Does it bother you?”

He didn’t answer. She walked to the door.

“Taiwo.”

She stopped but didn’t turn around.

“You could go back,” he said quietly. “To whatever you were before this. You’re a young woman. You have —”

“Good night, sir.” She said respectfully. The Sir was to rubbish his supposed honor.

She wanted to curse him with her best word. Bastard.

She didn’t need preaching from him, a serial fornicator or adulterer. Over the years, the bastard had pretended to be a godly Christian man who adored his wife and children but only her or other girls like her knew his secrets.

In the elevator, alone, she exhaled.

The numbers descended. She watched them and thought about nothing, which was a skill she had developed over the past two years the way women developed skincare routines.

Her phone buzzed with a message from her mom.

She read it once. She was very pissed at this woman.

Durotimi Thomas. She hadn’t heard his name in a long time, not since the last family dinner she’d attended before her father told her to leave his house and she’d walked out smiling. Twenty-nine-year-old Duro, probably rushing to find a wife before 30. Maybe his parents had put him to it. But why her? She wasn’t marriage material. The Thomas had Good values, Good money, Real Estate money, oil money, new tech money — they collected wealth across generations the way other families collected unresolved arguments and generational curses.

She’d met Duro three times in her life. He was the quiet type. She wondered if he still didn’t react to things. The last time she had met him was at her mom’s 50th birthday, a year ago in Dubai. He only came for the one of the seven activities planned for the 3-day event. The dinner. Her mom had been very happy to see him, like she had won the lottery. What could possibly be the joy this guy brought?

He had waved a quick “Hi” when he saw her from a distance within the hall. Taiwo hadn’t responded. She made him aware she was ignoring him. She had remembered many years ago when she’d texted him severally on Facebook as soon as she had a phone and got into senior secondary school and there had been no responses from him. Not one. She had been maybe fourteen then.

He had walked over to her that same night at her mom’s dinner. “Taiwo, how are you?”

“Now you see me?” she asked in a very offended tone.

“You are grown now.” he smiled back.

She had walked out on him. Grown now? The thought of that offended her. She had always been grown.

Now, she didn’t really care about him. She had other priorities. She continued ignoring her mom’s calls and chose to keep texting.

Taiwo stood in the marble lobby while the doorman pretended not to look at her.

Her mother never pushed like this. She was a woman who suggested and retreated, who planted seeds and left the room. If she was pressing, even gently, it meant something and she was not ready to care.

She put the phone away. Smiled at the doorman who greeted Good evening, ma — and walked out into the Lagos night. She didn’t care about tipping anyone tonight. Her mom had gotten on her nerves.

Durotimi. Principled Durotimi. A man who had made up his mind. About her.

He has no idea what I am now. He still thinks I am the same girl he knew ten years ago. She almost laughed. She’d see about that.

Author’s note:

If you enjoyed this episode, leave a comment. Let me know what you think about Taiwo.

Leave a comment

Go to EPISODE 2 HERE

Real sunlight, the generous mid-morning kind. This was not the early grey light she had been waking to in the second bedroom for weeks. The master bedroom faced east and at this hour it was full of it — warm and unhurried, falling across the bed, across her hands, across the duvet she had apparently pulled entirely to her side in the night.

She lay still for a moment, taking inventory.

She was in the master bedroom.

She was in their bed.

She remembered everything.

The shyness arrived like a wave — sudden and total and faintly ridiculous, given that this was her husband, given that they had been married for nearly two years, given every logical argument against it. Her face went warm. She became extraordinarily interested in the ceiling.

“Good morning,” Emeka said beside her.

“Morning,” she said to the ceiling.

“Are you looking at the ceiling for a specific reason,” he said, “or just in general.”

“I’m just—” she stopped. “I’m just looking at it.”

“It’s a good ceiling,” he said agreeably, with a lot of mischief.

“Emeka.”

“Ada.”

She turned her head. He was lying on his side looking at her like a man who found her completely wonderful, which was not helping with the ceiling situation.

“Stop,” she said.

“Stop what?”

“Looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like—” she pulled the duvet up slightly, which given that she was fully wearing her own clothing was objectively unnecessary and they both knew it. “Like that.”

He propped himself up on one elbow. He was trying not to smile and losing badly.

“Adaeze,” he said, with great solemnity, “I have seen you. We are married. You made me eggs once at six in the morning with a headwrap on and eye crust and you have never once been embarrassed about any of it.”

“That is completely different.”

“How?”

“It just is. Stop asking logical questions.”

He lost the battle with the smile entirely.

“Come here,” he said.

“I’m right here.”

“You’re over there being shy at a ceiling. Come here.”

She looked at him. She looked at the ceiling. She looked at him again.

She shifted over.

He put his arm around her and she rested her head on his chest and he pulled her close then pressed his lips to her hair and she lay there with her warm face hidden against him feeling approximately seventeen years old and also, underneath the shyness, something so much larger and quieter than embarrassment.

She felt safe.

“I need you to know,” he said, into her hair, “that last night was the best night of my life.”

“Emeka—”

“I need to say it. Because for a long time I was the reason you didn’t feel that in this house and I need you to know that I know that.” He held her a little more firmly. “I was not present. I was not here. And last night I was here and you were here and I felt the difference and I need you to know I felt it.”

She was quiet against his chest.

“I felt it too,” she said.

He exhaled. Kissed her hair again. “Good.”

They lay in the east-facing sunlight of the master bedroom and the city began itself outside their window and somewhere in the house the garden was doing the unhurried work of growing things and neither of them said anything for a long time and the silence was the kind that had never existed in this house before.

Not the silence of absence.

The silence of two people who are, finally, entirely present with each other.

“You still have my duvet,” he said eventually.

“I have cold feet.”

“You have cold feet in Lagos.”

“Thermoregulation is a personal experience.” she argued.

“That is not what that means—”

“I’m keeping the duvet.” she almost insisted.

“Adaeze—”

“Emeka.”

He laughed. It came from somewhere real and unhurried and it filled the room.

She smiled against his chest and she did not try to hide it this time.

Outside, the morning continued.

Inside, in the east-facing light, a marriage that had almost become a ruin was choosing — imperfectly, belatedly, with all the tenderness of something that had nearly been lost — to become a home

He checked his phone eventually.

“Ten forty-seven,” he said.

“That can’t be right.”

“We slept well.”

She considered this. “We did.”

“We should eat.”

“You should make something,” she said.

“I was about to suggest—”

“You were about to suggest delivery.”

“I was going to suggest that we consider our options—”

“You were going to suggest delivery because you don’t want to be the one to get up first.” She tilted her head up and looked at him. “I know you, Emeka.”

He looked down at her. Something moved across his face — the pleasure, she was learning, of being known by someone and finding that it felt like being wanted rather than being seen through.

“Eggs?” he said.

“Without pepper. Yolk slightly runny.” she said.

“I know,” he said.

He said it simply and without making anything of it. But she lay there for a moment after he got up and she thought about how long it had taken him to know that and how many mornings he had known it without doing anything with the knowing and how different it was to have the knowing turn into action, turn into almost-raw eggs without pepper said without fanfare as he got out of bed on a Thursday morning that was not a normal Thursday morning.

She got up, went to the second bedroom, picked up the bag from the corner and rolled it to the master bedroom.

She opened the wardrobe and began to unpack — quietly, item by item, without announcement, each thing returned to its correct place — and when she was done she closed the wardrobe and stood in the room for a moment and felt the particular, specific satisfaction of a woman who has decided something and then done it.

She went downstairs.

He was at the cooker when she came in.

He turned when he heard her and he saw her and then he saw her hands, which were empty, and he understood immediately what the empty hands meant.

“The bag?” he said carefully.

“Unpacked,” she said.

He turned back to the eggs.

She sat at the kitchen island and watched him.

She could see, from the angle of his face, that he was losing the battle with what was happening to his expression. His shoulders were doing something they did not normally do. Moving to some music playing in his head. His head dipped slightly.

“Don’t make it a moment,” she said.

“I’m not making anything,” he said. His voice was slightly uneven. “I’m making eggs.”

“You are making a moment about the eggs.”

“The eggs are simply eggs. I am only making them.” He cleared his throat. “Without pepper.”

She folded her hands on the counter. grabbed a mug of water and watched him and did not say anything more because sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a man is give him a moment to collect himself while pretending you are not noticing that he needs one.

He put her plate in front of her then sat across from her with his own.

They ate in the comfortable, warm, unhurried silence of two people who have run out of the need to fill silence with contentment and have discovered that actual contentment is quieter and easier and asks less of you.

Outside the kitchen window, the garden was full in the morning light.

She saw it first.

“Emeka.”

He looked up.

“Look.”

He turned.

The frangipani tree in the corner of the garden had opened overnight. The blooms were white and yellow and slightly extravagant, the way beautiful things are when they have been patient for a very long time and have finally been given reason to open. The border beds were full and definite with color. The lawn was green and even all the way to the corners. The whole garden was lush and alive and utterly itself in the morning light.

They both looked at it for a long time.

“It bloomed,” he said.

“It bloomed,” she said.

They sat with the fact of it.

She thought about a wedding night when they had stood on the patio together and she had thought: everything here was placed by someone else, nothing has grown on its own yet. She thought about two years of six fifty-three mornings and polite dinners and a heartbeat going on without its owner. She thought about a bathroom floor and three words offered upward from the bottom of herself. She thought about the second bedroom and the packed bag and the envelope on the counter and all the long, unlikely distance from there to here.

She thought about the answer that had come. The long way round.

But it had come.

She looked across the kitchen island at her husband — this man who had taken so long to arrive at his own life and had arrived, finally, completely, without reservation — and he was looking back at her with the smile that reached, with all of himself present and accounted for, with nothing withheld.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said.

She smiled.

And it was real — completely, all the way, without management and without reservation — and it reached, it reached all the way, and the kitchen was warm and the garden was blooming and the morning was full and unhurried and entirely theirs.

She picked up her fork.

“These are very good eggs,” she said.

He looked at her with the smile that reached his eyes.

“I know,” he said.

Outside, in the full morning light, the garden was abundant and alive with everything that had chosen — against the odds, through everything, the long way round — to grow.

The frangipani bloomed.

The borders held their color.

The lawn was green to every corner.

And inside, at a kitchen island, over runny eggs made without pepper, a man and a woman who had taken the long way round to each other sat in the ordinary, extraordinary light of a Thursday morning and began, simply and completely and without any more waiting,

to be home.

THE END

THE LONG WAY ROUND

For every woman who said God help me from the bottom of herself and kept going.

And for every man who arrived late but chose, when he arrived, to arrive completely.

The long way round is still the way.

If you enjoyed this story, please leave a comment.

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To Catch up on The Long Way Round series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here, Episode 4 here, Episode 5 here, Episode 6 here, Episode 7 here, Episode 8 here, Episode 9 here, Episode 10 here, Episode 11 here, Episode 12 here.

With Love…

Before We Begin

There is a kind of woman Lagos knows very well.

She moves through the city like she owns it — and in some ways she does, or has learned to act like she does, which in Lagos amounts to the same thing. She is beautiful and sharp and always, always in control. She does not ask for things. She takes them, or she arranges for them to come to her, which is more elegant and amounts to the same result.

Lagos thinks it knows everything about her.

It doesn’t know the half of it.

GIRLS LIKE ME don’t fall is a ten-part serialized story about Taiwo Adewale — last child, only surviving twin, Yale Law graduate with a 2.8 GPA she could have made a 4.0, returned daughter of one of Lagos’s most respected families, and a woman who has been at war with her own life for as long as she can remember.

It is a story about money and what it costs. About parents who love you and still manage to hollow you out. About the kind of life you build when the life that was built for you doesn’t fit. About shame — the kind you wear so long it starts to feel like a personality. About a man who stays when he should leave and prays for you when you don’t know he’s praying.

And about a woman who spent twenty-four years swinging at everything in her path, and had to learn — slowly, painfully, imperfectly — to swing toward something instead.

This story contains:

Adult themes and mature situations handled with honesty, not sensationalism. Faith conversations that do not have easy answers. A love story that earns itself. A Lagos that will feel very familiar to those who know it and very alive to those who don’t.

It will be posted weekly, one part at a time.

If you have ever read yourself from the back — if you have ever mistaken your worst chapter for your whole story — this one is for you.

Part One drops next week.

— Olubunmi Idowu

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Go to EPISODE 1 HERE

Not the performed nervousness of their wedding night, armed with silk slips and the collected instructions of women who loved her. This was something truer and more exposed than that — the particular vulnerability of a person who knows exactly what something cost them the first time and is choosing to try it again anyway.

She stood in the master bedroom in the lamplight.

Her lamp. Her side. The plant on the windowsill that had been placed there deliberately. The room that had been hers and then theirs and then functionally his and was now, by her own choosing, theirs again — in a different way. In a way that had been earned rather than assumed.

She felt the full exposure of it.

Emeka came out of the bathroom.

He stopped when he saw her standing there. He read her face the way he had learned, over these weeks, to read it — not managing what he saw there, just receiving it.

He crossed the room slowly.

He cupped her face in both hands — gently, with the unhurried care of someone holding something they understand the value of — and he looked at her for a long moment without saying anything. Just looking. The way he had looked at her sleeping in the second bedroom that morning — open, fully present, with nothing between what he felt and what his face was doing.

She let him look.

“I love you,” he said.

He said it looking directly at her, without the escape routes or qualifications that had characterised everything between them for so long.

“Adaeze. I love you. Not because you are good, though you are. Not because you stayed, though you didn’t have to and I know that. Not because our families make sense together or because you were the approved choice or because you are everything a man is supposed to want.” He held her face in his hands. “Because you are you. The way your mind works. The way you argued about that film like it was closing arguments. The way you make your eggs — actually, the way you make my eggs.” His voice was steady but something in it had changed quality, like a note that has been played for a long time and is finally being played with feeling. “I am sorry it took me this long to arrive where you were. I am asking you to let me stay.”

Her eyes filled.

She had not cried in front of him in about two years. She had cried alone on a bathroom floor and in the second bedroom in the mornings and in her car outside the office, in all the private places a woman cries when she has learned that crying in front of the person she loves costs more than she can spare.

She let herself this time.

The tears came, which were not the heaving grief-tears of the bathroom floor but something quieter and more releasing than that, the tears of a woman who has been given back something she had almost finished believing was gone.

He pulled her in.

She pressed her face into his chest and she cried as he held her and he said nothing — he had learned when not to fill silences — just held her, steady and warm and entirely present, his arms not loosening, his chin resting on top of her head, a man who was not going anywhere.

She felt it. She felt the not-going-anywhere of him.

The crying quieted.

She pulled back.

He brushed the tears from her face with his thumbs — slowly, carefully, with a tenderness so unhurried it was itself a kind of answer.

“I’ve got you,” he said. “I know I’m late. I’ve got you now.”

It was nothing like before.

Before had been careful. Before had been correct. Before had been two people in a bed who were both, in their different ways and for their different reasons, somewhere else.

This was not that.

He said her name like it meant something specific to him — like it was not a name he had been given for a woman he had married but a word he had discovered, the way you discover that a word you have known for years has a meaning you had missed.

He looked at her the way she had needed to be looked at since the wedding reception — not with the careful warmth of a man discharging a romantic obligation but with the full, undivided attention of someone who had arrived, finally, completely, without reservation.

She felt it in every moment. The difference between being managed and being wanted. Between being received and being cherished. Between a man who was present in the room and a man who was present in every possible sense of that word.

She had prayed for this.

Not in those exact terms. But on the bathroom floor and in the second bedroom on her knees and in three words from the bottom of herself, she had been asking for this. To be loved by her husband. To feel it. To know it in her body and not just in her head.

The answer had taken the long way round.

But it had come.

Afterward she lay in the lamplight of the master bedroom — the lamplight of their room, her room, the room she had come back to — and she looked at the ceiling and she felt, she took a careful internal inventory the way she would assess anything, she felt:

Loved.

Thoroughly. Completely. Unhurriedly.

Loved the way I was supposed to be loved.

She felt like herself.

Emeka lay beside her, his hand warm and heavy on her stomach, his breathing still slightly uneven, looking at the same ceiling like a man who has come home after a very long time away and is still, quietly, in a state of gratitude about the fact of the walls around him.

“Ada,” he said.

“Mm.”

“Are you okay?”

She took a careful inventory.

“Yes,” she said. And then, more quietly, the way you say things that are entirely true: “Yes. I really am.”

He turned his head. She turned hers.

He smiled.

She had been studying this smile since the wedding reception. She had stood with warm champagne and studied it and found it wanting — found the place where it stopped, just below his eyes, the careful managed performance of a man whose heart was somewhere else. She had carried that finding through two years of mornings and polite dinners and careful correct silences.

This smile reached.

All the way. Everything. His whole face.

And she was the reason for it.

She looked back at the ceiling because it was too large a thing to look at directly and also exactly what she had been waiting for, and she let out a long breath that carried two years of everything with it, and she thought:

God.

You really did answer.

The long way round. But You answered.

Outside, the garden was in the darkness of the night.

The frangipani buds, tight and full and certain, waiting for morning.

— Tomorrow they would open. And so, finally, completely, would she.

To Catch up on The Long Way Round series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here, Episode 4 here, Episode 5 here, Episode 6 here, Episode 7 here, Episode 8 here, Episode 9 here, Episode 10 here, Episode 11 here.

With Love…

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Episode 13 here

She looked at him. “Tonight?”

“The chef arrives at four.” He said this quickly. “You don’t have to do anything. Not a single thing. Just exist.”

“You planned a dinner party.”

“I planned a dinner.”

“For tonight?”

“For tonight, yes.”

“Without telling me until three o’clock.”

“I’m telling you now.” He looked at her with the expression — earnest, slightly braced — of a man who has made a unilateral decision and is hoping it lands well. “I wanted to do something for you. For us. Without you having to organize any part of it. Just sit and be — just be the guest for one evening.”

She looked at him for a moment and thought about saying something about notice periods and basic courtesy.

She thought about the morning. The eggs without pepper. The sofa. His hand on the patio.

“What will I wear?” she asked.

Something in his face relaxed. He almost smiled.

He mentioned, carefully, the wine-colored dress he had noticed in their shared closet — bought for an occasion that had not yet materialized, still in its bag. He had noticed it. He had remembered it. He said this with pride because he knew that noticing little things mattered to her.

She looked at him then went to find the dress in their master bedroom.

The chef arrived along with an assistant at four and moved through their kitchen with an authority of someone who understood exactly what they were doing, and the house began to smell like something worth coming home to.

Adaeze had positioned herself to be helpful and found she had nothing to help with then she retreated to the small bedroom beside the master bedroom to get ready.

She stood in front of the mirror in the wine-colored dress.

She had lost weight but she looked well. Better than she had looked in some time. The burden of the past months had lessened. There was something back in her face that she had not noticed leaving until she saw it returning — something she could only describe as herself. She was coming back to herself graudually.

She thought about this morning in this smaller bedroom. The morning light. His eyes watching her sleep.

She put on her earrings, half-smiling.

Emeka was in the living room when she came down — dark shirt, no tie, looking like a man who had made an effort without announcing it. He turned when he heard her and saw her in the wine dress and his face did the unguarded thing.

“You look—” he started. His heart sank a little. His wife had lost some weight and the dress was not as form fitting as it was the day he followed her to get it. But her look was still breathtaking.

“Don’t make it a moment,” she said.

“I’m just—”

“Emeka.”

He smiled. The real one. The one that had been there, she was beginning to understand, all along — she had just spent years watching it stop at his eyes.

It didn’t stop anymore.

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Biodun and Chisom arrived at six fifty-five — Biodun constitutionally incapable of lateness, Chisom in a yellow dress she wore like a woman who had decided years ago to inhabit her full amount of space and had never revisited the question.

Chisom embraced Adaeze at the door with the warmth of someone who had been rooting for this outcome and was deeply pleased to see it.

“You look well,” she said, holding Adaeze at arm’s length with both hands.

“I’m getting there,” Adaeze said.

“That,” Chisom said firmly, “is exactly the right answer.”

Biodun shook Emeka’s hand and then, because he was Biodun, pulled him briefly into an embrace and said quietly into his ear: “Don’t ruin it tonight.” And then stepped back with the serene expression of a man who had delivered an important message and was now available for dinner.

The food was extraordinary.

The chef had done something with fish that produced, at the first bite, a silence at the table — the quiet of four people encountering something better than they expected.

Biodun broke it. “I need this man’s number,” he said. “Chisom. We need this man in our lives.”

“You have never once complained about my cooking,” Chisom said, like she was noting something for the record.

“I have never complained. That is correct. I have simply been living without the knowledge that this other level existed.” He took another bite and considered it seriously. “This is information I should have had sooner.”

“I’ll remind you of this conversation,” Chisom said pleasantly, “the next time you tell me my jollof is your favorite thing I make.”

“It is my favorite thing you make. This is a different category. This is an experience that exists outside the category of favorite.”

“Those are the same category, Biodun.”

“Chisom. My love. My heart. My person.” He topped up his wine. “They are categorically not the same—”

“They are the same.” Chisom responded, ready to argue.

“I would like to table this for a calmer moment—”

“The moment is very calm. You are the one who is not calm.” Chisom insisted.

Adaeze laughed.

It came out fully, from somewhere real, unguarded and complete — the laugh that did not ask permission first, the laugh that belonged to a person who had, for a moment, entirely forgotten to be careful.

Chisom caught her eye across the table and smiled at her with the knowing warmth of a woman who had been waiting for exactly that laugh.

At some point between the main course and whatever the chef was quietly constructing in the kitchen, Chisom turned to Adaeze with the directness she applied to everything.

“Can I be honest with you about something?”

“When have you ever asked permission?” Biodun said.

“I’m asking Adaeze.” She looked at her. “About when the time comes. Children.”

Adaeze’s expression shifted — just slightly, just enough. Emeka, beside her, felt it.

“Tell me,” Adaeze said.

“Nobody tells you the true things,” Chisom said. “They tell you the beautiful things — the love, the overwhelming joy, all of which are real. But they do not tell you that your husband will be completely useless for the first ten minutes and then redeemed entirely for everything after.”

“That is a targeted assessment,” Biodun said.

“With the first one,” Chisom continued serenely, “he arrived at the hospital, saw me in the delivery bed, and stood in the doorway for approximately four minutes. Just standing. Doing nothing useful.”

“I was processing—”

“I was the one who needed processing support at that specific moment, Biodun. I was in active labour.”

“I was in the doorway—”

“For four minutes.”

“It may have been slightly less than—”

“Four minutes,” Chisom told Adaeze pleasantly. “And then he came in and he held my hand for the rest of it and he has never left a room I was in from that moment forward.” She picked up her wine. “With the second one he barely left the hospital. Three nights sleeping in a chair he described every morning as the most uncomfortable object in the history of furniture and returned to every evening.”

“Because I wasn’t going to miss anything,” Biodun said. Quietly. Simply. Without performance.

The table went quiet with something warm in it. Chisom and Biodun’s banter, she realized, were what she needed.

“When your time comes,” Chisom said to Adaeze, more quietly, “call me first. Before the hospital bag, before anything. I’ll come and sit with you and I will tell you everything they don’t cover in the antenatal class. Every true thing.”

“Including the breathing exercises,” Biodun said.

“Especially the breathing exercises,” Chisom confirmed. “Which are — and I want to be very precise about this — a beautifully packaged lie.”

“They did help with my breathing,” Biodun offered.

“You were not the one giving birth, Biodun.”

“I was breathing in solidarity—”

Adaeze laughed again. A full laugh, the kind that came from the stomach, and this time she did not try to stop it and it filled the dining room and Emeka looked at her laughing and felt something in his chest that was so large and warm and specific that it took him a moment to identify it.

Gratitude.

This was not the performed gratitude of a man saying the right things. The real kind. The kind that knows exactly what it was almost without.

Under the table, he found her hand and… She let him hold it.

The conversation found its way, the way good dinner conversations do, to the marriage itself.

“What is the thing nobody told you?” Adaeze asked Chisom. “The real thing. About staying married.”

Chisom was quiet for a moment, considering.

“That it is not a feeling that stays by itself,” she said. “It is a practice. Like prayer. Like anything that matters and costs you something. You do it when you feel it fully and you do it when you don’t feel it at all, and the doing is what keeps the feeling alive.” She looked at Biodun with the look of a woman who had chosen him through things other people did not know about and who had never stopped choosing. “There were years we were not where we are now. There were hard years.”

“Chisom—” Biodun said gently.

“They should know,” she said. And to them: “Young people get married believing the hard part is getting to the wedding. The hard part is deciding, every morning, to stay. Not grimly or as duty but as choice.” She looked at both of them across the table. “The people who make it are not the people who never struggled. They are the people who decided the struggling was worth it.”

Biodun looked at his wife. He had decided to choose her over and over again. He had decided that many times and would choose her again tomorrow.

Emeka looked at Adaeze.

She was looking at Chisom.

But her hand was still in his under the table.

And she was not pulling away.

Biodun and Chisom left at ten-thirty, replete with excellent food, with Chisom pressing her number into Adaeze’s hand and saying any time, any hour, for any reason with the warmth of a woman who meant all three. Adaeze had the number, she just never thought she would need it. She was the wife of her husband’s best-friend for gods sake.

The door closed.

The house settled into its after-guests quiet.

Adaeze moved through the kitchen — stacking, tidying, the small ritual of putting a house to rights — and Emeka stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her and thought about Chisom’s words.

A practice. Like prayer. Like anything that matters.

He thought about the second bedroom. The packed bag in the corner. The apartment she had bought that she had not yet moved into.

He thought about his father’s hand and his mother finding it.

“Ada,” he said.

She paused. Looked at him.

“Come back to our room tonight.”

She was quiet.

“Not because everything is fixed,” he said quickly, crossing into the kitchen, standing near her but not crowding her — he had learned this, the distance that felt like presence rather than pressure. “Not because I’m expecting anything. Just—” He looked at her. “I miss sleeping in the same room as my wife. I miss waking up and you being there. I miss—” His voice dropped slightly. “I miss us. The version of us that we’re becoming.”

She looked at the counter for a long moment.

“I’m scared,” she said quietly.

“I know.”

“Not of you.” She turned to look at him. “Of hoping again. Of letting myself fully — of dropping the last of the protection and then—” She stopped. “I was so careful for so long. And I got hurt anyway. And I had to build all of this back up.” Her hand moved slightly toward herself, indicating something she couldn’t articulate. “All of this. And I am scared that if I let it all down again and it goes wrong I won’t be able to—”

“Adaeze.” He stepped closer. He took her hands from where they had wrapped slightly around herself. He held them — both of them, firmly, warmly, with the unhurried steadiness of a man who was not going anywhere.

“You are not the same person you were then. And I am not the same man.” He looked at her. “I know I have to keep showing you. I know I cannot just say it and have you believe it — I know that, and I’m not asking you to believe it, I’m asking you to let me keep showing you.” He held her hands more firmly. “Come back to our room. Take one step back toward us. And every morning after this one I will spend being worth that step.”

She looked at their hands.

She thought about the frangipani buds in the evening light. Tight and certain.

She thought about Chisom: the people who make it are the ones who decide the struggling is worth it.

She thought about a bathroom floor and three words and the long, unlikely road from that floor to this kitchen to this man holding her hands in the warm light.

“Okay,” she said. “Go upstairs. I will join you.”

His face did the unguarded thing — the relief passing through him visibly, the gratitude that he no longer tried to hide or manage.

“Can I get a hug first?” he begged.

She looked at him. At her husband, who had asked her for a hug on a Sunday evening a few weeks ago with the simple directness of someone asking for something they actually wanted, and who was asking again now with the same simple directness, and who she had discovered — she was still discovering — meant it every time.

She stepped in.

He held on.

He always held on longer than the polite duration. She had come to know this about him — this man who had held her at a distance for years and who now, when given the chance, did not want to let go. His face in her hair. His arms not loosening. Not demanding anything. Just holding on.

She let him.

“I’m still here,” she said quietly.

“I know,” he said. And then, very quietly: “I’m so grateful you are.”

She stood in the hug and she felt the warmth of him and she thought about all the times she had stood in this man’s arms and felt the space between them and she thought about the fact that the space was gone and that she had not noticed exactly when it left but it was gone and in its place was simply him, present and unhurried and here.

She held on too.

Outside, through the kitchen window, the garden was dark.

But the frangipani buds were there in the darkness, full and waiting.

Tomorrow they would open.

— She was going back to their room. And something that had waited, through everything, to come home, was finally being let in.

To Catch up on The Long Way Round series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here, Episode 4 here, Episode 5 here, Episode 6 here, Episode 7 here, Episode 8 here, Episode 9 here, Episode 10 here.

With Love…

Episode 12 here.

She was in bed with her book. She looked at him over the top of it.

“There’s a video,” he said. “You need to see it.”

“One video,” she said.

“One video,” he agreed, sitting on the edge of the bed like he had been practising looking relaxed.

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The video led to another video.

The second video led to an argument about whether a particular comedian had gotten funnier or had simply gotten more famous, which are not the same thing and both of them had opinions about this. She took the phone from him to find a specific clip that proved her point and in finding it discovered three other things she needed to show him, and somewhere in the process of showing him things and him showing her things in return he had shifted back against the headboard to see the screen better and she had shifted beside him to show him and they were both propped against the pillows, side by side, scrolling and talking and disagreeing and laughing in the lamplight of the second bedroom with the ease of people who have forgotten that they are being careful with each other.

He showed her a comment thread that was objectively absurd. She laughed — really laughed, not the polite social laugh but the one from somewhere lower in the chest — and he looked at her laughing and thought: I did that. I made her laugh like that.

He was very happy with himself.

She showed him a thread about legendary system failures in tech history that her colleague had found, which she found professionally hilarious and he found genuinely interesting, and this led to a conversation about the nature of human error in complex systems that went places neither of them had planned.

“The problem,” she said, warming to the argument the way she did when she was engaged with something, “is never the system itself. It is always the assumption that the system is working that causes the failure. Nobody is looking at the thing that is already broken because everyone believes someone else is looking at it.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“That sounds familiar,” he said carefully.

She looked at him.

He looked back.

Neither of them said the obvious thing.

But it sat between them quietly, understood.

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Somewhere past eleven she said something that made him laugh — a real laugh, unexpected, from the stomach — and she looked at him laughing in the lamplight of the second bedroom and she felt something loosen in her chest. A knot she had been carrying so long she had forgotten it was not simply part of her anatomy.

She did not identify it out loud.

She let it loosen quietly.

Somewhere past midnight the conversation slowed into longer pauses.

Somewhere past one, the pauses became the whole of it.

Neither of them said goodnight.

The lamp stayed on.

The city outside went dark and quiet.

They slept.

*************************

He woke first.

The room was full of the soft gold of early morning — the particular quality of light before the day has fully committed to itself. He was on his side facing her. Her phone was between them on the pillow, screen dark. The lamp had been on all night.

He looked at her.

She was deeply, completely asleep — the kind that only comes when the body has decided it is safe. Her hair was loose across the pillow. Her lips slightly parted. The line between her brows — the one that lived there when she was awake, the one that came from thinking and carrying and managing — was completely gone.

She looked like rest itself.

She looked like peace.

He did not move.

He lay in the early light of the second bedroom and he looked at his wife and he looked at her with the full, unhurried, completely unmanaged attention of a man who had almost lost something before he understood what it was. He looked at the fullness of her lips in the morning light. The way one hand was curled slightly near her face like a child’s. The steady, trusting, unguarded rhythm of her breathing.

This woman, he thought. Not as a declaration. Just as a recognition arriving slowly, like the light. This woman said I’m fine on a hospital floor and got up and kept going. This woman carried a prayer in her work bag for three weeks because she was still hoping. This woman prayed alone in a room I did not know she was praying in and kept tending something I had stopped deserving.

He thought about the wedding reception. About watching her from across a crowded room and feeling the correctness of marrying her without the warmth. About twenty months of six fifty-three mornings and correct silences and a heartbeat she had pressed her ear to that was going on without him.

He thought: I am the luckiest man alive that she is still here.

He let himself look for a long time. Storing it. The quality of this specific light, the peace of her sleeping face. The extraordinary ordinary miracle of a Wednesday night becoming a Thursday morning in the second bedroom of a house that was finally — slowly, imperfectly, the long way round — beginning to feel like somewhere worth coming home to.

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She came back to herself in stages.

The unfamiliar angle of the ceiling first — not wrong, but different from her usual waking. Then the warmth beside her, the fact of another presence in the bed. Then the sharpening awareness — the kind that arrives like cold water — of being watched.

She turned her head.

Emeka was looking at her.

It was not the careful, managed, correct look she had lived beside for almost two years. He was simply looking at her — openly, fully, with nothing between what he felt and what his face was doing with it. Like a man who had stopped editing himself and was simply present in what he was.

She scrambled upright.

His hand caught her arm. “Hey. Hey, hey.”

“I didn’t mean to — we fell asleep — I should—” Her thoughts scattered.

“Adaeze.” His voice was warm and calm and unhurried. “Look at me.”

She looked at him, then dragged the blanket up her neck.

“Nothing happened,” he said. He held her gaze steadily. “We fell asleep talking. That is all that happened.” A pause. “I need you to know that I would never — not without you choosing it, completely, on your own terms. You are my wife. That has never meant I am entitled to you.”

She breathed.

She looked at him in the morning light and she thought about the man who had stood at a window on their wedding morning looking out at the garden while she stood in a cream slip in the bathroom gathering herself, and she thought about this man, the same man, in this room, saying I would never with a face that was entirely honest about it.

“Okay,” she said softly.

“Okay.” His hand was still on her arm, lightly. “Stay. Just a little while. You don’t have to be anywhere.”

She looked at the room. At the morning light. At him.

She stayed.

He checked his phone at seven-fourteen.

“I’m not going in today,” he said, already typing.

“You have a—”

“I’m moving it.” He looked up. “I want to spend today with you. Can we please have sometime together? Just us.” He looked at her with the expression she was learning — the one that was not a command but was somehow more disarming than a command. “Call in sick.”

“Emeka, I have a nine o’clock—”

“Adaeze.” Her name with that soft, particular gravity. “Please.”

She looked at the ceiling. She looked at him. She thought about her nine o’clock and her eleven-thirty and the afternoon review.

She picked up her phone.

“If my team misses a defect today,” she said, dialing, “that is entirely your fault and I will be telling them so.”

“I will sign a formal document accepting full responsibility,” he said.

“That is not funny.”

“It’s a little funny.” He smiled.

She told her colleague she was unwell. She hung up and he was looking at her with the expression of a man trying and losing the battle with how pleased he was with himself.

“Stop smiling,” she said.

“I’m not smiling.”

“You are absolutely smiling.”

“I’m just—” He put his phone down and looked at her and what was on his face was simple and unmanaged: “I’m happy. Ada. I’m just happy.”

She looked at him again then looked away before he could see her face do the thing it was doing.

“Make me breakfast,” she said. “Since you’ve disrupted my entire professional life.”

He was out of bed before she finished the sentence.

They spent the day with no agenda and without hurry.

He made eggs —no pepper, without being asked, without even a flicker of self-congratulation about remembering — and they ate at the kitchen island while the conversation went from nowhere to nowhere with the easy aimlessness of people who have nowhere they needed to be.

He showed her something on his phone. She corrected his interpretation. He conceded with a grace she was still recalibrating to — this man who used to absorb her corrections with the polite indifference of someone who had not really been listening, now conceding with genuine amusement, as though being wrong in front of her was something he found he didn’t mind.

In the afternoon she fell asleep on the sofa with a book on her chest and he sat in the armchair across from her and read and did not wake her, and when she opened her eyes there was mango juice ready and he had the expression of a man who had been trusted with a small thing and had been careful with it.

“You watched me sleep again,” she said.

“For a limited time,” he said. “I mostly read.” He almost chuckled.

“Emeka.”

“You looked peaceful. I didn’t want to be the thing that ended it.” He handed her the juice. “Also you were snoring slightly and I found it reassuring.”

“I wasn’t snoring.”

“A little.”

“I do not snore.”

“Adaeze. It was sweet. It was a sweet, small—”

“I do not snore,” she said, with great dignity.

He was trying so hard not to smile. “Noted,” he said.

She took her juice. She was also, she discovered, trying not to smile.

In the late afternoon they drifted outside into the garden.

The walk was not planned, it was just the natural momentum of a day without agenda taking them out into the evening light. They were beginning to work on being friends again. He reached for her hand as they stepped onto the patio and she gave it without thinking about it and only noticed she had done it two steps later.

She didn’t take it back.

They stood at the edge of the garden together and she looked at it — really looked at it, in the way she had not looked at anything in this house for a long time without the filter of grief or management or waiting.

It was different.

The border beds had real color — not the placed, maintained color of correct horticulture but something that had grown back, returned, recovered of its own choosing. The lawn was even. The dry patches that had spread through the second year were gone. And the frangipani tree in the corner — the one the landscaper had promised would bloom by December and had not, the one that had stood there for close to two years with the patience of a thing that had decided to wait — had buds on it.

Small and tight and absolutely certain of themselves.

She stared at them.

“The frangipani,” she said.

“I know.” He was looking at it too, smiling.

“It’s budding.”

“I know.”

They stood in the evening light and looked at the tree that had been waiting this whole time and neither of them said the obvious thing because the obvious thing didn’t need to be said.

Some things grow when someone starts genuinely tending them.

The garden had always known that.

It had simply been waiting for them to learn it too.

— She was beginning to believe it. And that, for a woman who had almost stopped believing anything, was everything.

*****

EXTRA: Emeka had planned a double-date with his friend Biodun. They had both spent time praying for the reveival of Emeka’s marriage. He wanted it to be a healthy interaction between 2 couples. So he would eventually let Adaeze know, and was hoping she wouldn’t mind.

To Catch up on The Long Way Round series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here, Episode 4 here, Episode 5 here, Episode 6 here, Episode 7 here, Episode 8 here, Episode 9 here.

With Love…

Episode 11 here.

Enjoy!!!

Biodun’s advice came in a flood.

Emeka had pulled over on a side street on Admiralty way, engine running, and Biodun had delivered his accumulated wisdom with the confidence of a man who had been waiting for exactly this occasion.

First, Biodun said, call her in the middle of the day for no reason. Not to ask where something is. Not logistics. Just call and tell her you were thinking about her. She will think something is wrong or you want something. Do it three times before she starts to believe you mean it.

Second — Chisom taught me this so take it seriously — ask her opinion on something in your world. Your work. A decision you are making. Not about the house or something domestic. Something that shows you think her mind matters to you. Because it does. You have simply never shown it.

Third. Find out what she is following online and bring it up first. Before she does. This will confuse her. That is fine. Confusion is better than indifference.

Fourth. Touch her like she is someone you want to touch. Not someone you are managing. She is your own wife. Hold her waist, touch her thigh, touch her anywhere you feel like. She’s yours. There is a difference that a woman knows in one second flat. Learn the difference.

Fifth — and this one is the most important — apologise specifically. Not “I’m sorry for everything in a kitchen at 2am” or any other BS thing that comes to your empty head. Sit down. Look at her. Tell her the specific things you did and what they specifically cost her. She needs to know you understand the actual damage. Not just that you feel bad about it in a general way.

Emeka sat in his car and listened to all of it.

“You’ve been thinking about this for a while,” he said when Biodun finished.

“I have been watching you mismanage a good woman for close to two years,” Biodun said, without heat. “I was waiting for you to be ready to hear it. You are obviously now ready. ” He paused. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“We also need to go to MFM, because you need to be delivered of LOLA!” Biodun added this laughing loud. “I am serious. At least 2 nights. You’ll be fasting.”

“Ah!”

“Say AH! Again. You put this on yourself.”

******************************

Emeka had explained to her after he came back from visiting Lola, the morning Adaeze had given him the divorce papers, that nothing had happened between them and that even though it would have happened, it didn’t happen. He had promised to keep things with Adaeze open and not hide anything anymore.

Adaeze had wondered if he was expecting an applause or a standing ovation. It was the bare minimum.

He assured her that he respected her too much to cheat or break their marital vows, and had begged Adaeze to give him three months for him to make her change her mind about the divorce. Biodun had advised him to.

She had listened to him but had also insisted on staying in a separate bedroom from him. He had begged her to not let it be that bad, and she had assured him that the early morning meals would not stop and she would continue like previously.

******************************

He tried.

He tried with the earnest, particular imperfection of a man learning a new language in a country where everyone else already speaks it fluently.

The first midday call was the next day. He stopped between meetings, went to a quiet corner of the office corridor, called her.

She picked up and said immediately: “Is everything alright?”

“Everything is fine,” he said. “I was just thinking about you.”

A pause long enough to contain a full recalibration. “Okay,” she said carefully.

“How is the project going? The new system your team is testing.”

Another pause. Shorter this time. Something shifted in her voice — it was an unconscious, unguarded animation of someone talking about work they are genuinely good at. “We found one critical defect this morning that two other teams had completely missed.” She paused. “It was a good morning.”

“That sounds like you,” he said. “Finding what everyone else missed.”

She said nothing for a moment.

“I’ll let you get back,” he said. “I just wanted you to know you crossed my mind.”

He hung up and stared at the corridor wall and thought: One.

*******************

He brought up a trending debate about a film, TKAM, at dinner one night later. He had spent twenty minutes reading about it beforehand so he would not sound ignorant.

She looked across the table at him like a woman checking his face for the location of the joke. What had gotten into this man that made him want to talk?

“You watched it?” she asked.

“I haven’t. I read about it. I wanted to know what you thought.”

“Why?”

“Because you have strong opinions and good taste and you never tell me either.”

She looked at her food. Then: “The people defending Efe are wrong. Efe is not the victim. Oboz is. They are not the same people. We all know Oboz is the temperamental one with impulsive decisions. Everyone has bad in them. They just pretend. Efe was pretending.”

“Make the case.”

She looked up. Something moved across her face — not warmth yet, but the change that comes before it.

“You actually want to hear this.” she wanted to be sure.

“I asked, didn’t I.”

She made the case. Thoroughly and with focus, the full argument of a woman who had stopped expecting to be listened to in this house and was adjusting in real time to the experience of being asked. He listened. He pushed back on one point, carefully, and she disagreed back with the energized precision of someone who respects the disagreement, and they went three rounds on it and neither of them noticed how much time had passed until she got up to clear the plates.

There was something different in the way she moved through the kitchen afterward.

Not forgiveness yet.

But a door less closed than it had been this morning.

*******************************

He knocked on the second bedroom door on a Thursday morning with his tie half-knotted and an expression of elaborate innocence.

“Come in,” she said.

He stood in the doorway. “I can’t get this right,” he said, gesturing at the tie.

She looked at it. It was a perfectly acceptable knot. She had watched this man knot his ties for many months.

“Your tie is fine, Emeka.”

“It doesn’t feel right.”

“Emeka.”

“Adaeze.”

She pressed her lips together against something that was almost, briefly, a smile. She put down her book, got up from the bed, crossed the room, stood in front of him and took the tie in both hands. She straightened the knot that absolutely did not need straightening. She smoothed it against his chest once — the quick, brisk movement of a woman doing something she knows perfectly well is not what it appears to be.

Then she stepped back.

His hand caught hers before she could fully withdraw.

“Thank you,” he said. He said it simply. Looking at her.

“You’re welcome.” She looked at their hands.

He held on for a moment. Then he leaned forward slowly — one centimetre at a time, telegraphing every bit of the distance — and pressed his lips to her forehead. Warm and unhurried. He stayed there for a second longer than was technically necessary.

She went very still.

He then pulled back. He looked at her face carefully. She had not stepped away from him.

“Have a good day,” she said. Her voice was slightly different than it had been thirty seconds ago.

He exhaled. “You too.”

He left. She stood in the second bedroom with her fingers touching her forehead and her book forgotten on the bed and she thought about the wedding night when she had pressed her face to his chest and felt a heartbeat going on without him.

This had felt different, like something going on with him.

She noticed the difference.

She picked up her book and tried to read it.

*****************************

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He asked for a hug on a Sunday evening.

They had been in the living room — her on the sofa with her laptop, him in the armchair with his phone — and he had put his phone down and looked at her with the unguarded directness that was becoming, she was finding, harder to deflect than his politeness had ever been.

“Can I have a hug?” he said.

She looked up from her laptop.

He looked back. He was not performing anything or making it romantic or strategic. Just asking. Simply, directly, like a person asks for something they actually want.

She looked at her laptop. She looked at him. She wanted to ask why. This man was beginning to distract her.

She closed the laptop and got up, heading out of the living room.

He was in the way. He immediately stood and put his arms around her and she stood in the hug with her arms around him and she waited for the polite-duration end of it.

It did not come.

He held on. His face pressed into her hair. His arms not loosening when the socially acceptable window had passed. She could feel that he was not going to be the one to let go and she understood that this was not manipulation — it was a man who had kept her at a distance for almost two years and was now discovering, at close range, that he did not want the distance. He did not want to lose her.

She let him hold on.

“I’m still here,” she said quietly, into his shoulder. It came out without her planning it.

He held on tighter, briefly. “I know,” he said. His voice was slightly uneven. “I just need to feel it sometimes.”

She stood in the hug and she thought about all the times he had held her correctly and she had felt the space between correctly and warmly and she thought about the difference between those two things and how much she had lost to that difference.

She stayed in the hug until he was ready to let go.

He was not ready for a long time.

******************************

He went to his father on a Friday.

Pastor Ejuka was at home, recovering — the cardiac event having redistributed something in him that no amount of faith had redistributed before. He was slower. More deliberate. Less interested in the performance of strength. He sat in his study in his housecoat and looked like a man who had been shown the edge of something called Life and had come back with new eyes.

Emeka sat across from him and told him everything.

Not the version that reflected well on the Ejuka name. Everything. Lola from the seminar room to the hotel entrance in October. Adaeze from the wedding morning to other mornings in the kitchen. The miscarriage he had not properly grieved. The papers. What Lola had told him in Lekki. “I don’t want to lose my wife.”

His father listened completely. Without interruption.

When Emeka finished, the study was quiet for a long moment.

“You have been afraid,” his father said. Each word chosen with the care of a man who had recently been given reason to choose words carefully. “You have been so afraid of becoming what you imagined I was that you never stopped to ask me what my marriage actually was.”

Emeka looked at him.

“Your mother and I were not always the third row on the right side,” the pastor said. “There were years. Hard years. Years before you were old enough to understand what you were watching.” He paused. “I was not always the man she needed. I chose, Emeka — I chose again and again over many years to become that man. It was not given to me. It was not automatic. It was a decision I made every morning.” He looked at his son steadily. “A marriage is not a destination you arrive at. It is a direction you choose. Every morning you choose it again.”

“I don’t know if she still wants this,” Emeka said.

“Then bring her here. Both of you. Let me talk to you together.” He looked at his son. “Not as a pastor. As your father.”

*********************

Emeka asked Adaeze on a Sunday morning.

He told her his father had asked to see them both. That it would mean a lot during the recovery. That his father wanted family around him. He lied. Adaeze knew. It was most likely about the marriage.

She was in the second bedroom when he asked, sitting on the edge of the bed in her Sunday clothes.

He noticed, without mentioning it, the packed bag in the corner.

She looked at him for a moment. Then: “Okay.”

He drove. She sat in the passenger seat with her hands folded in her lap and her face toward the window. The city moved past. He did not fill the silence with noise. He had been learning, over these weeks, to let silence be silence rather than a problem to manage.

She noticed he was not filling the silence.

She also noticed, without saying so, that she minded it less than she used to.

His father met them in the sitting room. His mother brought mango juice and then disappeared with the elegant discretion of a woman who understood perfectly what was happening even if she had not been told.

Pastor Ejuka looked at his son and his son’s wife sitting on the sofa with the distance of two people negotiating a shared space, and he looked at Adaeze and said, simply:

“Tell me about the day you knew something was wrong.”

She looked at this man she had known since she was a teenager. This man whose church she had grown up in. This man who had smiled at them from the pulpit in the third row every Sunday and seen, she understood now, considerably less than she had believed he was seeing.

She opened her mouth for the composed answer.

Then she looked at his face — slower now, more human, less pulpit — and she gave him the true one.

She talked for a long time.

Emeka sat beside her on the sofa and he listened to everything she said and he did not look away from a single word of it.

It cost him something to listen. She could see it costing him. She watched him sit with the full weight of what she was saying —he was not managing it, not finding a way around it, just sitting with it — and something shifted in her chest that she was not ready to name yet.

She kept talking.

He kept listening.

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It was a Tuesday evening some days later, and they were on the sofa — not at opposite ends this time, a development that had happened gradually enough that neither of them had marked it — and she was showing him something on her phone about a project her QA team had just won a commendation for, and he was genuinely following it and asking questions, when his phone lit up on the cushion between them.

Lola.

He saw it at the same moment she did.

He did not turn the phone over. He did not let it ring out while pretending to be absorbed in something else. He looked directly at Adaeze and he picked up the phone and turned the screen toward her so she could see the name clearly. Then he answered it and put it on speaker, setting it on the cushion between them.

“Lola.”

Her voice came through warmly and directly. Emeka. I’m calling before I leave. Going back to London on Monday. I wanted to say — I’m glad we had the conversation we had. And I’m glad you went home that morning.

“I’m glad too,” he said. He was looking at Adaeze when he said it.

How are things?

“Better.” Still looking at her. “Things are better.”

Good. The smile was audible in it. That’s really good. Take care of yourself. She paused. She sounded like she wanted to say something but thought against it.

The call ended.

The room was quiet.

Adaeze looked at the phone on the cushion between them. Then at him. She read his face — checking for the place where the performance diverged from the truth, for the gap where something was being hidden.

She found nothing.

For the first time since the wedding reception — since she had stood with warm champagne and studied a smile that stopped just below his eyes — she found nothing.

“She’s going back to London,” he said.

“I heard.” She didn’t sound angry. Not even an ounce.

“I want to go and see her before she leaves. And I want you to come with me.”

She looked at him. “Why?”

“Because I don’t want anything between us that lives in shadow. Not anymore.” He held her gaze. “And because I want her to see us. Together. With your hand in mine. I want to close this the right way, in front of you.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

She thought about the second bedroom. The packed bag in the corner. The apartment she had with its two spare bedrooms.

“Okay,” she said.

********************************

They met Lola at a café in Victoria Island on a Saturday afternoon.

She was already there — of course she was — and she stood when they approached. The recognition of a person seeing something clearly and accepting it without complication. She looked at them together—this man she had known for years and the woman beside him, who was small and composed—and something in her expression settled.

“Adaeze,” she said, with genuine warmth. “I have heard about you for years.”

“I can’t say the same,” Adaeze said pleasantly.

Lola laughed. A real laugh. “Fair,” Lola said. She had come here ready for something. Adaeze was not giving it to her.

They sat. Adaeze was observing Lola and didn’t see any reason to be defensive. She was not one to name call other women or describe them in derogatory terms. She didn’t do well with drama. She hadn’t even come here with her husband to show she was fine. Adaeze was always fine regardless.

Emeka reached across and held Adaeze’s hand on top of the table. In the light. Where it could be seen. Not hidden in his lap. Not performed either. Simply there — the hand of a man who was not hiding anything.

Lola noticed.

He could see her noticing. He could see, in the quiet settling of her expression, a door closing in the right direction — permanently, without drama, without anyone needing to say the words.

They talked for about 20 minutes. About London. About his father’s recovery. About her plans. The conversation of two people with a complicated history who were finding, without it needing to be announced, a cordial future. It was almost awkward.

Before Lola left she held Adaeze’s hand for a moment and looked at her.

“He talks about your work,” she said, “like you personally invented the concept of quality.” She paused. Then, quieter: “You are a strong woman, Adaeze.”

She said it pleasantly. Almost tenderly.

Emeka heard it and went still for a half second. He didn’t know how that would land.

Adaeze looked at Lola.

She knew what strong woman meant in the mouth of a woman like Lola—she had grown up in Lagos, she knew the language, she knew the particular way those two words were used to describe a woman who endures what she should not have to endure. She knew Lola was not paying her a compliment.

She also knew that she was no longer that woman.

She smiled.

“Thank you,” she said simply.

She did not explain the smile. She did not clarify what the thank you was for. She simply received the words, returned Lola’s gaze steadily, and let Lola make of that what she would.

Lola looked at her for a half second longer than she planned to. Then she left. Adaeze had held her gaze back, without cowering. She thought her size would intimidate her. Adaeze was not fazed in the slightest.

Adaeze glanced at Emeka.

He looked back at her and did not look away.

He never remembered mentioning her work to Lola. But that was a questions for another day.

Right now he was looking at his wife—this woman he had spent years thinking of as fragile, as too proper, as someone to be careful around-and he was seeing her clearly for what felt like the first time. She had stood in front of Lola and received a blade wrapped in silk and smiled and said thank you and held her gaze without moving an inch.

He had not known he had a bold woman for a wife.

The fragility opinion he had carried of her quietly died in that cafe, on a Saturday afternoon, in the warm Victoria Island light.

**************************

They walked to the car in the warm afternoon light, his hand in hers, the city going about its Saturday business around them with perfect indifference.

“You talked about my work,” Adaeze said.

“I talk about you,” he said simply. “I should have been saying it to you instead of about you. I know that.”

She was quiet.

The packed bag was still in the corner of the second bedroom.

She was beginning — just beginning — to think about what it would mean to unpack it.

Not yet.

But beginning.

*************************

Outside the duplex, the garden was changing.

Quietly. Without announcement. The way growing things change when someone has finally started paying real attention to them. The border beds showing new colour — real colour, not just maintenance. The lawn evening out. The dry patches gone. The frangipani tree in the corner had begun, at last, to bud — small and tight and full of everything they were quietly promising.

Adaeze had been praying every morning in the second bedroom. On her knees on the small rug beside the bed. Offering everything she was and everything she hoped and everything she feared, without management and without performance.

Just herself. Just the truth. Just: here I am. Help me know what to do with this.

The garden did not know this.

Or perhaps — perhaps — it did.

— Some things grow only when someone is genuinely tending them. The garden understood this. And slowly, carefully, so was she.

To Catch up on The Long Way Round series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here, Episode 4 here, Episode 5 here, Episode 6 here, Episode 7 here, Episode 8 here.

With Love…

Episode 10 here

She had planned to. She had gone to bed with the intention formed and the manila envelope in her work bag where it had been for three weeks, and she had lain in the dark listening to him sit alone in the kitchen and she had thought: tomorrow.

But the morning came and she looked at his face across the breakfast table — drawn, tired, the weight of his father’s hospital night sitting on him alongside something else she could not yet fully name — and she thought about the prayer she had said on the bathroom floor.

God help me.

She was still waiting to understand what the help looked like so she gave him one more day.

She watched him.

And what she saw in that one day was a man who came home at six in the evening instead of eight. Who sat at the dinner table without his phone in his hand. Who asked about a work problem she was navigating and listened to the full answer. Who looked, for the first time in two years, like a person who was uncertain. This didn’t change anything.

Uncertainty was more promising than confidence. Confidence could be performed. Uncertainty was harder to fake.

She waited one more day.

On the third morning, she put the envelope on the kitchen counter.

***************************

He saw it the moment he sat down.

He looked at it without touching it. Then at her. She was standing at the counter with her tea, looking down at the envelope. Not at him.

He reached across and picked it up. Lifted the unsealed flap. Pulled out the document and read the heading and sat with what it was for a long moment in the morning kitchen light, then stood slowly.

“What is this?” he asked. Though he knew.

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Adaeze said nothing. Kept her eyes on the counter.

“Adaeze.” He held the papers. His voice was careful. “What do we need this for?”

She looked up at him then. Her eyes clear and honest and completely steady.

“To be free,” she said quietly. “To love whoever we want.”

The kitchen was very still.

He looked at the papers in his hands and then at his wife across the counter — his wife who had loved him from the beginning without conditions, who had carried almost two years of this marriage largely alone, who had lost a baby and told him she was fine, who had kept an envelope in her work bag for three weeks because she was still hoping. He had seen the edge of it in her laptop bag, even then, he hadn’t wondered or bothered.

To love whoever we want. He tried to picture her with someone else.

The image would not form. This was not simply jealousy — it was more disorienting than jealousy. It was the sudden, vertiginous understanding that she was a person who existed independently of him. That she would continue to exist. That some other man would look at this woman and see what he had spent two years failing to see and would not, would not make the same mistake.

He set the papers down.

“I’m not signing this,” he said.

“Why not?” she argued. “You deserve to be with someone who is always on your mind, whose thoughts keep you absent from here. You are always absent. Only your body is here, your mind is not.”

“Divorce is not an option for us.” He could hear his father’s voice in his own. “My parents—”

“Emeka.” She said it without anger, but with the full weight of someone who had thought about this for a long time. “You are not your father. And I am not your mother.”

“I have seen what divorce does to a family.” The tightness was building in his throat. “I sat outside my father’s study as a child and I heard him counsel broken homes through the door. Almost every week. I know what it sounds like and I know what it does and I am not—” His jaw worked. “I am not going to do that.”

This was the first time she was seeing him vulnerable, but she didn’t want to care. “Nothing is holding us back, Emeka.” she stated this fact plainly. “We have no children.” That one hurt! “And the love of your life is back in the city.”

“Don’t—”

“I am making this easy for you.” She said it with gentleness. “You need to be with the woman you love.”

“But I love you, Ada.” He said this like he was trying to convince her. Trying to convince himself. Trying to locate the truth of it somewhere inside himself and hold it up to the light. “I do love you.”

She laughed at him because it was not believable.

She had spent two years learning the difference between being loved and being kept, and who had finally, on a bathroom floor in the dark, accepted which one she had been.

She did not argue with him.

“I have an apartment in Kuramo Towers ” she said. “Two bedrooms. I will be moving out by the end of the week. I am making this easy for you, Emeka.”

His phone buzzed on the counter between them.

He looked down before he could stop himself.

Adaeze watched his face do the thing. The half-second of stillness. The way his expression shifted in the register she had spent two years learning. The register that had a name now, even if she had never said the name aloud.

She looked away.

“Can you give me till the end of today.” He looked at her. Something past argument now. Something more exposed. “Please, Ada. I am not in the right frame of mind to think clearly. Give me today. Please.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

Then she nodded. Once.

He picked up his keys, his jacket and walked out of the kitchen. She heard the front door and then the sliding of the gate and then the silence of the house.

************************

Adaeze stood alone in the kitchen.

The papers still on the counter with the corner of them showing from the envelope.

She breathed in slowly then out. She had already imagined herself alone in her 2-bedroom apartment and she felt, to her own quiet surprise, entirely calm. She felt like she had finally put something very heavy down and for the first time in a long time, feeling the full height of herself.

The hardest part had come out of her.

Whatever happened next, the hardest part was done.

She picked up her tea which had gone cold and drank it anyway.

***************************

He drove without direction for twenty minutes before he found himself parked outside Lola’s mother’s compound in Lekki.

He stayed put in his car.

He had not planned to come here. He had simply driven and his hands had brought him here and he was tired of pretending this surprised him.

She met him at the gate. Her younger sister — quieter, more conventional, a woman who inhabited her life without Lola’s particular intensity — was at work, remotely. They sat in the living room as two people with a long shared history.

“How is your father?” she asked first.

“Better. He’s been home since yesterday.”

She nodded. Then she looked at him with the probing look she had always had. “You have something to tell me.”

“My wife gave me divorce papers this morning.”

Something moved across Lola’s face that he could not fully read.

“And?” she said.

“And I need to ask you something directly.” He looked at her. “What do you want, Lola? From me. From whatever this is that has been happening since you came back.” He held her gaze. “I need the honest answer.”

She looked back at him, smiling.

This was the thing about Lola — she had never flinched from a direct question. It was one of the things he had loved most. It was also, he was only now fully understanding, the reason she had always been honest with him. She had said no twice. She had said marriage is not for me with complete clarity.

He had just chosen, for three years then, not to hear it.

“Honestly?” she said.

“Please.”

She set her cup down. She was quiet long enough that he had the answer before she gave it.

“I needed a friend,” she said. “When I came back I was more lost than I let anyone see. My husband was gone and London felt finished. I was lost without him. I came back to Lagos and everything was different from what I knew and I needed someone who knew me from before all of it. Before I was a wife and then a widow.” She paused. “You were that person. You have always been that person.”

“And beyond that?” he said carefully.

The longest silence yet.

“Emeka.” His name with a gentleness that was somehow more difficult to receive than coldness would have been. The gentleness of someone handling something they do not intend to keep. He understood now, that she only ‘liked using him’. “You are one of the best people I know. I mean that completely and without qualification. You are good and decent and—”

“Would you have wanted me to leave my wife for you?” He asked it directly. The way she had taught him to ask things.

The silence lasted longer than any before it.

“No,” she said. And he heard that it was the true answer — not something designed to spare him. The actual truth. “No. I don’t think so. I think I would have wanted last week to continue. The ease of it. The talking. I wasn’t thinking past that.”

He nodded slowly.

He had known. he had known. That to Lola he was comfortable. Familiar. A safe place to rest in a disorienting time. That she genuinely liked him, respected him, felt safe with him.

But she had said no twice.

She had married a man she had known for weeks.

She had, in the clearest possible language available to a person, shown him consistently who he was to her. A spare, not the main. Never the main.

He had spent three years choosing to read it differently. Maybe if I show her I am capable of giving her the love she wants, she will really see it and love me, but that was never enough for Lola. He knew if Lola had come back to him some days to his wedding to Adaeze years ago, he would have eloped with Lola. He was foolish like that.

He would have been a placeholder. He knew this now, he had finally let himself see something he has been looking away from for a very long time. Not maliciously — she was not a malicious person. Really?

But a placeholder nonetheless. Somewhere to rest while she gathered herself before the next chapter of her life, which would almost certainly, eventually, feature someone else. Someone who arrived with the force that Emeka, with all his goodness and all his loyalty and all his pastor’s son correctness, had apparently never had for her.

He thought about Adaeze saying: you deserve to be with someone who is always on your mind, whose thoughts keep you absent from here. You are always absent. Only your body is here, your mind is not. He thought about the selfless love she had given him for so long that he never deserved.

He thought about Adaeze standing at the kitchen counter with her cold tea.

He stood.

“I have to go,” he said.

Lola looked at him. He saw it — surprise she hadn’t expected to feel, and underneath the surprise, something that looked very much like respect.

“Okay,” she said.

He looked at her one last time. At Lola. At what she had been to him for years and what he had always, honestly, been willing to be for her. He felt something shift — not disappear, he was honest enough to know it would not simply disappear — but loosen. Change its shape. Become something he could carry differently. A cog in his wheel of happiness.

“Take care of yourself,” he said.

“You too, Emeka,” she said. And then, quietly: “You really should.”

He walked out into the Lekki morning.

He sat in his car for a long time.

Then he called Biodun.

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Biodun answered on the first ring.

“I need advice,” Emeka started.

“Is this about Adaeze?”

“Yes.”

Biodun thought about saying You need more than advice, you need deliverance, but decided against it. “Finally.” He said it without elaboration. “Talk to me.”

Emeka talked. He told Biodun everything — the restaurant, the hotel Lola had booked, the prayer he hadn’t known he was saying, his mother’s call, the kitchen scene, the papers, Adaeze’s face. He told it straight, without the performance of a man in control.

Biodun listened without interrupting, which was itself a statement.

When Emeka finished, the phone was quiet for a moment.

“You really almost went to that hotel,” Biodun said.

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Because your mother called.”

“Yes.”

“And just before she called—”

“I said God help me,” Emeka said. “And then she called.”

Biodun was quiet again. Then: “Emeka. Your wife has been carrying your marriage alone for almost two years. She lost a baby and told you she was fine. She found out about Lola from a phone screen and said nothing. She drew up divorce papers and kept them in her bag for three weeks because she was still — she was still hoping, Emeka. Do you understand what kind of woman does that? Do you understand what that costs a person?”

Emeka looked at the steering wheel.

“I know,” he said.

“No,” Biodun said quietly. “I don’t think you fully know yet. But you’re going to have to learn. Fast.” A pause, and then Biodun shifted and underneath the seriousness was the friend Emeka had known for fifteen years: “Okay. You want to know how to win your wife back. I have been waiting for you to ask me this for months. Do you have time?”

“I have time,” Emeka said.

“Good,” said Biodun. “Oya”

**************************

Back in the duplex, Adaeze moved a few of her things to the second bedroom.

Not packing, yet.

She had stood in the doorway of it and made a decision: she would move in here while whatever was happening finished happening. She would give herself space and the situation room to resolve itself. She would not move into the apartment quite yet.

But she would not sleep in the master bedroom either.

Not until she knew.

She moved her pillow. Her charger. The small devotional book she had not opened in months. Her Bible too.

She stood in the second bedroom — smaller, quieter, facing the garden — and she looked out of the window.

The garden that her husband had never really looked at.

She looked at it now.

Thin in the borders. Uneven in the lawn. The frangipani tree standing with patient resignation.

She thought about the prayer on the bathroom floor.

She knelt beside the bed.

She had not prayed. Like really prayed — from the inside, without performance — in longer than she could honestly remember. She had said the words and gone through the motions but she had been so busy managing her life that she had lost the habit of simply being in the presence of the one who held the life. God.

She was not going to manage anymore.

She pressed her forehead to the bed and she let everything out. Every six fifty-three. Every polite dinner. Every night on the left side of a bed beside a man who was somewhere else. The miscarriage. The bathroom floor. The cold tea. The envelope. All of it offered upward without performance.

Just herself. Her broken self, to God. She didn’t forget to surrender her Love of Emeka to God as well. She wanted no part of it anymore.

She prayed for a long time.

When she stood up, the room didn’t immediately feel different.

She looked out at the garden, hoping to have ease the leaves had.

The frangipani tree stood in its corner, patient and unblossomed. Waiting for someone to tend it properly.

— Two people had said the same prayer in different places. The answer was coming. But answers, Adaeze was learning, do not always arrive the way you expect them to.

To Catch up on The Long Way Round series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here, Episode 4 here, Episode 5 here, Episode 6 here, Episode 7 here.

With Love…

Episode 9 here

She was awake. She had been hardly sleeping — been lying in stillness, she had decided not to be available — but she let him believe otherwise for a moment before she hummed softly and turned her head slightly.

“Good evening.” Her voice was flat with something wearing the costume of tiredness. The evening in the greeting was deliberate when she knew they were already in the early hours of the next day. “You came late. I couldn’t wait up. Do you want your food now?”

“Yes,” he said. He wanted more than food. He wanted connection but this was not the time to say it.

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She rose slowly.

He watched her cross the room ahead of him and noticed — in the way that guilt sharpens everything it touches — that she was thinner. Is this my fault? He thought. The curve of her shoulder blades were visible under her spaghetti strap top in a way he didn’t remember from before. He watched her walk and felt, compressed into this single moment of watching his wife cross their bedroom in the dark, the weight of everything he had not done and had not been and had not given. He had only been a neglectful husband.

He followed her to the kitchen, heart sinking again. He only just realized how neglectful he had been.

Five steps behind her.

Not quite closing the distance. Not sure it wouldn’t startle her.

****************************

The kitchen light at this hour was merciless — bright and completely indifferent, the kind of light that does not allow for softness or pretense. Adaeze moved through it with the efficiency of a woman who had made her husband’s late meals many times before. Refrigerator. Covered dish. Plate. Microwave. Timer set for three minutes, doing a task she had stopped thinking about while doing it.

He stood by the kitchen island and watched her.

Her hair was loose and uneven from the pillow. Her face under the bright lights had the expression of a woman who had been awake for hours doing something difficult and was not going to admit to either. Jaw set. Eyes slightly too focused for twenty minutes past two in the morning. She looked, he thought suddenly, like she would bite him.

He laughed.

It came out before he could stop it — not cruel, not at her, just genuine, surprised out of him by the fierceness of her face in the bright kitchen light at 2am.

She turned. Looked at him. “What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. You just—” He stopped himself.

“I just what?”

“You look like you could bite me.”

She looked at him for a moment. Something moved across her face that was not quite a smile and not quite not one. “Go and sit down, Emeka.”

He sat.

He shook his head again, still smiling slightly.

He wanted her. He wanted his wife right now. Right here in this kitchen, but Adaeze was too proper for spontaneity. He didn’t want that good boy image of himself to be misread by her. He didn’t know if he was just shy around her or afraid to hurt her. She seemed fragile.

She studied him for a half second like she was recalibrating, then turned back to the microwave.

“How was your business meeting?” She said it evenly. Her fingers made brief, deliberate quotation marks in the air around the last two words. Just precise . For now, she had chosen accuracy over confrontation.

His heartbeat shifted. He kept his face still.

“The meeting was fine.” He paused. Took the opening she had given him, the one that was also true: “Dad was rushed to the hospital tonight.”

She turned immediately. The professional distance dropped from her face like something she had simply set down on a counter.

“What happened? Is he alright?” She crossed the kitchen without thinking about it — her hand reached for his on the counter and then stopped, her fingers barely grazing his before she pulled back.

She had forgotten for three seconds that they were not that kind of married.

“He slumped,” Emeka said. “He’s stable. Mild cardiac event. They’re keeping him overnight for monitoring.” He paused. Then, before she could fully retreat back into herself, he reached out and took her right hand. This was not the careful duty-grip she knew or the hand-holding of hospital corridors and church pews, but this was more correct, like the warmth of a man not acting. It was less rehearsed. This had bypassed the performance entirely. “Adaeze.”

She looked at their hands.

He looked at her face.

For a moment—only a moment--she did not pull away. She stood in the kitchen with her hand in his and she looked at him looking at her. Some heat passed between them. It was beyond warmth because this kind was not gentle. It was almost passion.

Then she looked away.

“Emeka—”

“We haven’t said more than two sentences to each other daily since the day that—”

“No.” The word came quietly but with the full weight of a door held shut. “Please. Not now,” she insisted.

“Why won’t you—” he started

“Emeka.” His name like a boundary she was holding with her body weight. “Please.”

“Why?” he asked it again. He begged for a response. Tonight, he was a man who was, genuinely asking and was ready for what she would share.. He wanted more from her now. “Why won’t you let me in? Even tonight. Even after everything.”

Adaeze was unsure what to share. “Because…”

“Because what?”

She shook her head. “Not tonight, Emeka.”

She took a step back and looked at him properly. She saw desire in his eyes. This wasn’t what she was expecting.

He was looking at her in a way he had not looked at her before — or a way she had stopped expecting him to. Something had changed in him tonight. Something cracked by his father in a hospital bed and his mother’s voice on the phone and whatever had happened or almost happened before the phone rang. The polished, correct surface of Emeka Ejuka had developed a crack, and through the crack something unmanaged was visible.

What happened to you tonight? she thought.

And immediately: Lola! Something happened with Lola. Something must have happened with Lola, or almost happened. And now he is here in our kitchen at 2am holding my hand and looking at me like he has just woken up inside his own life. It all came back to her.

She knew the difference between someone choosing to be present and someone who had been frightened into it.

She knew which one she was looking at. Emeka had been frightened.

The microwave beeped.

She pulled her hand from his. Gently and with finality like she was reclaiming something that belonged to her, like her freedom.

She went on to dish his food in silence, — plate set in front of him, water in a glass beside it, the small careful act of wifely provision. She pushed the plate slightly closer to him then turned to leave.

“I’m sorry,” he begged.

She paused on her way out.

The kitchen held his words for a moment.

“I’m sorry, Adaeze.” He tried again, his voice was different. Lower. Something in it was not the careful tone she was used to from him. This one had fear in it. “For everything. All of it.”

She stood with her back to him.

She could feel his words touch some parts of her — reaching everything, finding every place that had been waiting without knowing it was waiting. She had wanted to hear those words. On the day of the miscarriage when he had held her hand in a hospital corridor. At six fifty-three in the morning. On their wedding night. On the bathroom floor some hours ago.

She had wanted them.

But she looked at his plate — his completely untouched plate, the food she had kept warm for him all evening while he was somewhere she was not allowed to know about — and she understood something.

He was not looking at his food.

A man who had come from a client dinner should be hungry.

He was thinking about her.

Because of what happened with Lola tonight, she thought. He is here and saying I’m sorry because of her. Not instead of her.

“Emeka.” Her voice was quiet and even. “You have said ‘sorry’ before, now, in the kitchen when your food is getting cold and your father is in the hospital, I realize something has frightened you. I don’t know what it is.” She paused, to search the right next words, then continued. “I don’t doubt that you mean it, But I have been waiting for those words for almost two years. In the wrong places and times, and they still land.”

He looked on. He didn’t know what to do. Argue? Thank her? commend her?

“I need you to eat your food,” she said. “And I need to go to bed.”

She turned and looked at him one last time. She looked at her husband sitting at the island he had chosen for this kitchen in the house he had bought for their correct life, with his untouched food and his open face and his 2am apology.

She memorized him exactly as he was in that moment. She knew she was now ready to let go of this man and marriage.

“Goodnight, Emeka,” she said and walked out of the kitchen.

**********************

He sat alone, could not eat.

He sat in the bright kitchen for a very long time with his food going cold in front of him and he thought about his father’s hand and his mother finding it and he thought about the hotel entrance and he thought about Adaeze’s face just now — Adaeze’s face tired.

At some point he looked at the food.

He pushed the plate away and began to reflect.

He thought about what she had said—I have been waiting for those words for almost two years—and he thought about all the mornings she had served him and the evenings where she had tried to make some connection, when she had asked Tell me something real that happened at work today and he had given her a vague response instead, not wanting to develop connection through convo.

He thought about the baby they had lost five weeks ago.

He thought about how quickly he had accepted I’m fine.

He thought about what I’m fine costs a person to say.

She kept warm food for me. Me who was almost choosing Lola over this safe place. She kept the food warm.

He put his head in his hands. He did not know how long he sat there.

Outside, the garden was dark and still and unattended.

The frangipani tree stood in the darkness, not blooming, waiting.

— She had already made her decision. He just didn’t know it yet. And tomorrow, she was going to put it on the kitchen counter and see what he did with it.

To Catch up on The Long Way Round series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here, Episode 4 here, Episode 5 here and Episode 6 here.

With Love…

The restaurant was the kind that understood discretion.

Low lighting. Tables generously spaced. The soft insistence of jazz doing the work of privacy. The sort of place where things happened that people needed to not be seen happening.

She was already there.

Of course she was.

She was sitting with ease, like a woman who had never needed to arrive early to feel ready. Grief had done something to her face — weighted it, given it a depth he had not seen before. She was thirty years old now and she looked like someone who had lived inside those thirty years rather than simply moved through them. Lola knew how to enjoy her life.

She stood when he arrived.

They embraced — brief, careful, the hug of two people navigating a complicated history in a public space. Emeka was too forgiving.

“You look well,” she said.

“So do you,” he said. He was right about Lola’s beauty. There couldn’t be more to it. She had become slightly bigger. More settled in herself. Had she had a child or two? His heart sunk.

They sat.

*********************

For the first hour it was, as she had said it would be, nothing heavy.

She told him about London. About her husband — she spoke of him with a measured amount of honesty, like she was trying to only share good memories. He had been a good man. Not perfect. Kind to her. It had not been a love story. She lied about that part.

Emeka knew Lola. He thought about how easy it was in the past for Lola to lie about many things, especially if the truth would stop her from getting the next thing she had on her mind. She lied easily. Emphasis on Easily.

Around Lola, he could be anything he wasn’t supposed to be. It gave him a sense of freedom. He didn’t need to be perfect here. Around Lola, all his morals flew out the window. Morals? What was that? She brought out a side of him that made him think he was living life at the fullest. At the end of every connection, he would usually feel guilty, but he didn’t mind. That had been slowly eroding his conscience.

He tried to come back to the conversation at present.

Ok. Lola had said something about her late husband, her marriage not being a love story. LOL. No one could force Lola into doing what she didn’t want to. She must have loved the late man. He smiled, unknowingly, obviously forgetting that he was right in front of her.

She turned her head to the side, her eyes still fixed on him, trying to get a response. Maybe something about him not loving his wife.

He knew he loved Adaeze but he wouldn’t declare it and couldn’t act it. Right now, Lola didn’t need that information. Misery loved company. She wanted to be with Emeka tonight. He wanted the same thing.

He didn’t say anything.

She asked about his father’s church. She had always said she liked Pastor Ejuka, — she had met him once, years ago, in London. He carried his faith like something he actually believed, she said, and not something he was performing.

Emeka smiled. A real smile. He noticed, in the back of his mind, that it was real. He was proud of his dad.

******************

The second hour was different.

The plates cleared. The wine having done its slow work. The restaurant thinned around them. The jazz shifted into something slower and closer.

Lola was looking at him with the expression she wore when she was about to say something true.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes,” he said. Already knowing he should have said no.

“Are you happy?”

In your marriage. He knew that was the remaining part of her question.

He had evaded this indirect question earlier. The question sat between them.

The correct answer gathered itself automatically — yes, of course, the marriage is young, Adaeze is wonderful — and he opened his mouth and heard how it would land and closed it again.

Lola smiling, watched him.

“That’s what I thought,” she said quietly.

That’s what I wanted you to think. Emeka thought. He could act too. Act like his life was miserable. He thought his life was good with Adaeze but, not great. It wasn’t a problem and he didn’t think it needed to be addressed. Their marriage was fine.

*************************

The atmosphere slowly changed. It was not a seduction. He needed to be honest with himself about this. She had not laid a trap. She was simply Lola — direct and warm, it was the familiarity of someone who had once known the inside of his mind — and the danger was not in what she was doing but in what he would feel after. Guilt.

Sitting across from her at the table, he felt, for the first time in nearly two years, like a young, care-free man again with no responsibilities. He didn’t feel like a provider or a dutiful son or a church-going husband or a correct address owner. He felt like a person, whose interior life was of interest to someone he wanted. Who was seen, fully, by someone who was genuinely curious about what lived inside him.

He had forgotten what that felt like.

The forgetting, it turned out, had not made him stop wanting it.

When the bill came she mentioned a hotel nearby. She had a room. She said it simply, without drama or performance. The fact of it laid in front of him for him to decide about. He settled the bill and glanced at his phone. The screensaver had his wedding photo. He and Adaeze, smiling at the camera, not looking at each other. Him slightly behind her, with an arm around her waist.

He had just put this picture the moment he agreed to meet with Lola. He felt he needed it to remind him not to step out. Was it helping now?

He stood. Should I stay or should I go?

She stood too, waiting for him to join her.

They walked out into the warm October night together and the city moved around them and he knew — with the full, clear knowledge of a man raised to understand the difference between right and wrong, a man who had sat outside his father’s study door and heard through it the sound of marriages breaking — that he was walking toward something he may not be able to walk back from.

He thought about his father’s voice from the pulpit. A man of honor does not always allow his flesh.

He thought about Lola’s laugh in that corridor in the UK, five years ago. He thought about the almost three years they had spent together in his room and in her room. He thought about how he forgot the principles he had lived by. Marriage should be honored by all and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral. He wondered why that bible passage came up in his thoughts. Was it meant for his time with Lola in the past or his time now as a married man with Adaeze? He was a sinner, and he had loved it.

Then he thought about Adaeze on the left side of their bed. Adaeze at six-thirty in the morning making his breakfast. Adaeze saying I’m fine in a hospital corridor five weeks ago with a face that was anything but fine.

They reached the hotel entrance.

He stopped walking.

And from somewhere so deep inside him that it bypassed thought entirely — from the place where the faith his father had planted still lived, underneath everything he had piled on top of it over the years — three words surfaced like something that had been holding its breath underwater for a very long time:

God help me.

This was raw, not performed. Not the polished Sunday morning prayer of a pastor’s son in the third row. Three raw, honest words from a man who knew exactly what he was about to do and felt the full weight of the wrong in it and could not, in his own strength, stop.

God help me. Again.

His phone rang.

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******************

He looked at the screen.

Mum.

The world re-organized itself in the half second it took to read the word.

He answered.

Her voice came through — high and tight in a way he had never heard it, his mother who had sat through thirty years of ministry with a steadiness people mistook for coldness which was actually just faith that had been tested enough to become structural.

“Emeka. Your father. He collapsed in the study. We are on the way to the hospital. Come now.”

He was moving before she finished the sentence.

He looked at Lola. She had already read his face and had probably heard his mom’s almost-scream.

“Go,” she said immediately. No hesitation. No complication. “Go, Emeka.”

He went. He was thankful.

***********************

He drove with both hands on the wheel and his heart somewhere in his throat and the city blurring and the fear for his father real and flooding and underneath it — underneath it, if he was honest, and tonight he was trying very hard to be honest — something else.

Something he would not look at directly until much later.

The specific, shameful, undeniable relief of a man who has been stopped before he became someone he could not come back from.

God help me, he had said. Again.

And it was heard.

***********************

Across the city, at that same hour, Adaeze was on the bathroom floor.

She did not know exactly when she had moved from the bed to the bathroom. She had been sitting on the edge of the bed when the feeling had come — not a new feeling, but a new density of it, the accumulated weight of everything she had been carrying arriving all at once in the silence of this evening.

She had known where her husband was.

She didn’t know the exact address, or name of the restaurant or the fact of the hotel room nearby. But she had known he was with Lola, in the way she always knew things, not from evidence exactly but from two years of fluency in one man’s atmosphere.

She had felt him shift the moment Lola came back into the city. She had watched his distractions change and she had known, in the way her work had trained her to know things, that the system had a critical flaw it was no longer successfully hiding.

Tonight the flaw had a location.

She sat on the cold bathroom tile with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up and she thought about her life with the terrible, unmanaged clarity that comes when you stop protecting yourself from the full truth of it.

She was twenty-six years old.

She had a good job and a good mind and parents who loved her and friends who were loyal and a faith that had been with her since before she could read the words for herself. She had given the best of herself — her loyalty, her patience, her body, her years, her hope — to a man who received all of it correctly and felt none of it. She had lost a baby five weeks ago and said I’m fine because his half-hearted care felt worse than no care at all. It showed her the outline of the thing by being so clearly not the thing.

She sat with all of this.

She let herself feel it fully for the first time. Fully felt, in the dark of her bathroom on the floor.

She had been thinking about divorce papers for three weeks. She had had them drawn up quietly and professionally and carried them in her work bag like something she was not yet ready to put on a table but needed to know was available.

She had been waiting for a sign about whether there was anything left worth staying for.

Tonight, on this floor, she understood that she had her answer.

She opened her mouth and three words came out — quiet, stripped, completely honest:

“God help me.”

This was Just three words from a woman who had nothing left to dress them in. Three words from the bottom of herself, offered upward without management or performance.

She sat in the silence after them.

And then something shifted.

A settling — the way a storm reaches its furthest point and you feel, not the end of it, but the turning. She sat with it. She breathed with it. She let it move through her.

And when she got up off the bathroom floor she got up with a decision that had not fully formed yet but was forming — quietly and certainly.

She washed her face.

She looked at herself in the mirror for a long, steady moment then went to bed.

She lay in the dark and listened to the empty space beside her and she waited for her husband to come home.

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********************

He arrived at two in the morning.

His father was stable. Mild cardiac event — serious enough to frighten, not serious enough to be the end. His mother had sent him home at midnight, her composure restored, saying go to your wife, your father is better now, you go home.

He came through the front door and stood in the entrance hall of his house in the dark and thought about his father in a hospital bed and his mother in the corridor finding his hand — not for the congregation or appearances, just because after thirty years it was the hand she always reached for.

He climbed the stairs and stood in the doorway of the master bedroom.

Adaeze was in bed on her side. Still as a woman asleep or a woman who had decided to be unavailable.

He got into bed beside her and lay on his back in the dark. For the first time in a very long time he did not fall asleep quickly.

He lay in the dark and thought about the hotel entrance and three words he had said to the night sky and the phone that had rung at exactly that moment. He thought about coincidences. He thought about his father. He wanted to speak with Adaeze. He wanted connection.

He touched her shoulder gently.

She was awake. She had not been sleeping.

************************

Outside, the garden was dark and unattended, the frangipani tree motionless in the windless night.

— Two prayers had been said in different places in the same city at the same hour. Neither of them knew it. But God had heard both. And tomorrow, everything would change

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With Love…

To Catch up on The Long Way Round series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here, Episode 4 here, Episode 5 here.

See Episode 7 here

Adaeze didn’t know this immediately. She found out the way she had learned most things about the inside life of her husband — from the atmosphere around him. He couldn’t hide from her.

A shift in pressure.

A change in his silences. Emeka had always been a quiet man but his quietness had levels and she had lived inside it long enough to define each of them.

This was a different kind of quiet. She knew there was something.

He had come home on a Wednesday evening earlier than usual, which should have been good and instead felt like a warning, and he was distracted and this was not the work kind of distraction. She knew work distraction — it made him terse and efficient, eating quickly, disappearing into his laptop. This was softer than that. This was the distraction of a man whose mind was somewhere it wanted to be.

He was almost gentle at dinner.

She had set the table and when he came in, he had looked at the food and said: “You didn’t have to do all this.”

“I was cooking anyway,” she responded.

He sat down, looked at the food, then: “Thank you.” At least, this could take his mind off Lola’s message.

“Mm.”

She watched him from across the table.

He ate without chewing, just swallowing. His phone was beside his plate—He had placed it there himself, which he rarely did. It was usually in his hand and face up and he would be checking it between bites.

Tonight it was face down.

Adaeze could tell he was trying to hide something from her. He tried to look relaxed but failed.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“Fine. Long.” He looked up briefly. “Yours?”

“We closed a testing cycle. Good day today.” She wanted to tell him more. She wanted to share that she got promoted and was celebrated at work but she picked up her fork instead. “You’re home early.”

“Meetings cleared.”

“All of them?”

“Most of them.” He turned to focus on his food.

He was being careful. She could see it, a man who was managing his face, present in the room but working to stay present, even though he had something he never planned to mention and hoping she wouldn’t notice.

She noticed.

She always noticed and didn’t say anything about it.

********************

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What Emeka knew about Lola’s return he had learned from Biodun, who knew everything about everyone and delivered this particular information like someone who did not know that this should have never been brought up in front of Emeka.

They had met for their monthly lunch earlier that week, a Tuesday—this was an arrangement that had survived job changes, marriages, and the general drift of adult life because they didn’t have to perform for each other.

Biodun had been talking about a property deal in Abuja when he said between bites, very casually:

“You heard Lola is back?”

Emeka looked up. Lola?

“Her husband died o. The older man. Something with his heart. She’s been back two weeks, staying with her mother.” Biodun took another bite. “She looks good sha. Different but good.”

Different how? Prettier? She can never be? There’s no more to that beauty. Emeka wanted to say.

Someone at the next table was laughing at something her partner had said. A waiter was refilling their glasses without being asked.

“I didn’t know that,” Emeka had said. Carefully.

Biodun looked at him. Just a quick glance. He had known Emeka for a long time and remembered the story that had not ended well. “Now you know,” Biodun had said, and returned to his food.

Emeka looked at his plate.

“Did she—” he started.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He picked up his fork. “Nothing.”

Biodun looked at him again this time with more attention. He was deciding whether to say the thing he thought Emeka was about to say.

He let it pass.

“This property in Abuja,” Biodun continued. “I think there’s a problem with selling the apartments. People don’t want it. Maybe the location is the proble-”

Emeka listened half-heartedly.

The rest of him was already somewhere else.

**************************

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She was a widow. She was a widow now.

He sat with this fact in his office on a Wednesday afternoon, the city in the gold haze of Lagos October below his window. He sat with the thought, knowing he shouldn’t be wallowing in it.

He thought about her in that classroom. The notebook. The firm handshake. The laugh he had spent three months earning.

He thought about their first night, their second and the many wild nights after that. He thought about the two NOs at the park and at the restaurant.

He thought about a mutual friend’s text informing him about Lola’s wedding and the two days he had spent crying without leaving his flat.

He was twenty-seven years old now and his wife was in their house and the woman he had loved since he was twenty-two was across the city, eight minutes drive away, in her mother’s house and had sent him five sentences which he had read eleven times.

She had messaged him this Wednesday afternoon, the day after the lunch with Biodun.

Five sentences. Nothing more.

He read it at his desk right before lunch.

He picked up his phone. I shouldn’t indulge this.

He put the phone back down.

Picked it up again.

Outside the office window, Lagos continued its indifferent afternoon, twenty floors below, going about its usual boring and fast-paced business. Lagos didn’t know that a man was sitting at a desk trying to choose the kind of man he wanted to be. Lagos didn’t care.

Emeka didn’t know what to do about this message but he knew he didn’t want to speak to Biodun about this. Not yet. He couldn’t eat. He also hadn’t been able to focus on work since 1:13pm when the message had come in. He found himself driving towards home around 4pm. He hadn’t planned to be home early today.

********************

Adaeze saw the name four days later.

Sunday morning. Still in her robe, about to make her tea. His phone on the island while he was upstairs. The screen lit briefly and went dark and she was not the kind of woman who read her husband’s messages — she had her dignity and had always had it — but the name was already there in the half-second before she looked away.

Lola.

She set the kettle down and stood very still in her kitchen.

Lola. The notification had not shown the message, just the name. She had noted this name since Tobenna’s palm-wine honesty over three years ago. She had kept it in the careful archive of things she knew but had not been given permission to know. She had never said it aloud. Not to Emeka, or her mother, or Chidinma. She had held it quietly in the place where she kept the things she knew but could not use without becoming someone she did not want to be.

A woman who checked her husband’s phone. A woman who asked questions designed not to find truth but to force confession. A woman who let what she suspected destroy what she was still hoping for.

She had not wanted to be that woman.

But she stood in her kitchen and looked at the dark phone screen and she understood that whatever she had been managing was entering a new phase.

Upstairs, Emeka’s wristwatch had vibrated. A notification. He glanced at it and his chest tightened. His phone was downstairs.

He ran down quickly.

Ada was standing at the kitchen island when he walked in. The kettle was in her hand, his phone was on the island between them, screen dark.

He walked to the island and picked it up without looking at her.

He had read Lola’s new two-sentence message. He knew it was Lola of course and had saved her number since Wednesday.

Adaeze picked up the kettle, finished making her tea and went upstairs.

Emeka didn’t follow her immediately. He guessed she had seen the name on his phone.

Some minutes after, he came upstairs. She had heard him move through the house below. He opened the refrigerator and closed it, like someone trying to buy all the time in the world to avoid confrontation. He opened the Microwave too. And then silence.

She heard him on the stairs.

He stopped outside the bedroom door. A pause long enough to mean something. He is probably typing on his phone. she thought. Her back was turned away from the door when he came in to see her on the bed.

“Are you not going to church?”

“No,” she said. “Go and represent. Greet the parents.”

He nodded and went.

She sat on the edge of the bed after he left, holding her tea, she began to remember all the days, the decisions and the things that had all come up to produce the results of today.

She thought about the quarterly calls she and Emeka had exchanged over the three years he was in London. Brief, warm, the calls of two people keeping a line open. She had believed those calls meant something about what they were to each other.

She was beginning to understand that a line kept open is not the same as a line that means something to both people equally.

She set her tea down on the bedside table. She already knew what was coming. She just didn’t know what she was going to do about it.

************************

Outside the duplex, their garden stood in the awake light.

The frangipani had not bloomed last December as promised. The border beds were thin in places. The lawn had patches that had never quite recovered from the dry season. Something in the overall arrangement had lost its initial confidence — less lush, less certain of itself.

Like something that had been well maintained but never truly wanted.

— The garden was waiting. And across the city, something that had been buried for two years was beginning, quietly and dangerously, to resurrect.

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See you Next Friday.

(If you want the episodes quicker, You can Like, Comment, and Share. Let’s have at least 20 likes, 10 comments, 5 restacks and the next episode will come 5 days earlier. If that doesn’t happen, this will continue to be a weekly something: Fridays, 7am.)

With Love…

To Catch up on The Long Way Round series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here, Episode 4 here.

See Episode 6 here

Emeka left the house at six fifty-three every morning.

She knew this not because he told her but because she had started waking at six-thirty or earlier to make breakfast — toasts on some days, couscous, scrambled eggs, rice, a decision made quietly and alone, the way she made most of her decisions in this house — and she had timed him without intending to. Six fifty-three. He ate whatever she made, no complaints.

The particular sound of his car reversing down the driveway. The mechanical grinding of the gate sliding open. And then silence — the silence of a house with only one person in it, which is a different silence from an empty house.

She could tell the difference now.

The thing was, he had never asked her to.

This was perhaps the most quietly confounding thing about Emeka Ejuka. —he never demanded. Not once, not in any area of their life together. He did not ask her to wake early. He did not ask her to keep his food warm. He did not ask her to arrange her life around the rhythm of his. He was, in every measurable sense, an undemanding husband. The kind of man who did not raise his voice, did not issue instruction, did not place expectations on his wife that she had not first placed on herself.

And she had placed many on herself.

She woke at six-thirty because she felt that it was something a good wife did to prepare her husband before he faced the day—because she had been raised to understand that this was one of the ways a woman loves, and because she genuinely believed, in those early months, that consistency in the small things would build something larger.

She also liked to cook and was good at it, and because the table was one of the few places in this house where she could offer him something and watch him receive it without complication.

And in the private hours of their marriage, in the space that belonged solely to them, he did not demand there either.

She had been the one to reach for him. Always. From the beginning, from the morning after their wedding when he had stepped back and left her standing in the cream slip in the middle of their bedroom, she had understood, without anyone saying, that if anything was going to happen between them it would begin with her.

He would never refuse her. He had never been that kind of man. If you forget the morning after their wedding. When she came he received her—warmly enough, gently enough, with the careful consideration he brought to everything—but he did not come to her first. He did not reach in the dark. He did not find her hand. He did not turn toward her like a man who cannot help himself.

The church would have called him self-controlled.

Adaeze would have called him respectful.

Both of these things were true.

But lying beside him in their bedroom in the dark, in the silence after, Adaeze had begun to understand the difference between a man who waits out of honor and a man who waits because the wanting is simply not there. No interest. One of those silences is the silence of discipline. The other is the silence of absence.

She knew which silence she was lying inside.

She kept reaching for him anyway.

By the eight month she stopped initiating and she had the quiet withdrawal of a tide going out while no one is watching the shore. She had tried —with patience and the wisdom of women who loved her plus the hope she had carried into this house like furniture. She had arranged all of it carefully and none of it had made him look at her the way she needed to be looked at.

So she stopped. She was tired.

He did not appear to notice for almost two weeks.

When he did notice, he came to her for the first time—on a Thursday evening, considerate as always, because even in this he would not demand, he simply slid closer to her on the bed and when she didn’t budge, he tapped her on the shoulder backing him. And she received him because he was her husband and because some part of her was still carrying the prayer from the wedding reception.

And it was the same as it had always been. Present. Careful. Hollow at the center.

She had not yet decided which was lonelier —a husband who took too much or one who needed so little that you could disappear entirely into the giving and he would not notice the shape of you was gone.

Afterward she lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought, with a clarity that frightened her in its calmness:

This is going to be my life.

A fact arriving the way facts do — without asking permission and without softening itself for the occasion.

She turned her head and looked at Emeka’s profile in the darkness. His eyes were already closed. His breathing already evening out. A man that was not bothered by what she was lying awake with.

Does he know? she wondered. Does he lie here and feel the same emptiness and simply call it something else? Or is this genuinely enough for him — this polite, bloodless, correct life? Is this how marriage is supposed to be?

“Emeka.” she begged.

“Mm.” Already half asleep.

“Are you happy?”

A pause. The quality of the pause told her more than the answer would.

“Yes.” he said “Are you?”

It sounded like a lie. She looked at the ceiling.

“I’m getting there,” she said.

“Good.” he said. He did not ask what she meant by getting there. He did not ask what distance remained between where she was and where she wanted to be. He accepted the answer without pressing further.

His breathing began to even out.

She lay in the dark and started thinking to herself: I asked him if he was happy and he said yes and didn’t ask me back first. He asked me back as a courtesy. As a return question. Not because he needed to know.

She pressed her fingers lightly against the sheet.

She thought about Pastor Ejuka’s smile from the third row.

She thought about all the rules Emeka had followed. The grades. The masters. The job. The many investments. The four-bedroom duplex. The wife from a good family — the family friend, the one their parents had been quietly weaving into the fabric of his future for over twenty years.

He had done everything right.

She was the last item on a checklist.

And the cruelest part — the part she turned away from and then returned to in the dark, — was that he had not deceived her.

She had known.

She had stood at that altar knowing and said I do anyway, betting everything on the possibility that love given consistently enough could eventually outrun its own absence.

She was almost twenty-six years old now and she was beginning to understand that some races cannot be won by effort alone.

********************

Their early mornings had a routine now. He usually woke before her, when she heard him in the bathroom first—the shower, the sound of him moving through the getting-ready process like he had always being doing for many year before he got married, she would activate her ‘wake button’ . By the time she came downstairs, the coffee he had made for himself would be half-finished on the counter and he would be checking his phone with his jacket on.

“Morning,” she would say.

“Morning.” He would look up briefly. “You didn’t have to come down.”

“I wanted to.”

“I’m heading out soon.”

“I know. Sit. Eat something first.” she would almost argue.

He would look at the plate she was setting in front of him with the expression of a man who had not asked for this and did not want to be rude about not asking for it. “I usually just take coffee.”

“I know what you usually take,” she said the third time this exchange happened. She said it pleasantly, without edge. “Sit down, Emeka. Five minutes.”

He sat.

He ate.

He left at six fifty-three.

She stood at the kitchen window and watched the gate slide shut and she thought: five minutes. I got five minutes this morning. That is what I am working with.

She wanted to cry out badly. She wanted to speak to someone but had been taught to never share marital problems with anyone.

*********************

He came home between eight and nine in the evenings. Sometimes later.

Investment banking is not a nine to five, he had explained early on, and she had nodded and accepted this and kept his food warm. She knew he could work remotely if he wanted to, but she didn’t want to try to convince him and still end up getting rejected. It seemed like a problem for him. She kept these thoughts to herself.

The evenings had their own ritual.

She would hear the gate first, then his car, then his key in the door. She would be in the living room or the kitchen or sometimes already upstairs, depending on the hour, and he would come in with a particular quality of tiredness—jacket loosened, phone in hand, already somewhat elsewhere even as he walked through his own door.

“Hey,” he would say.

“Hey, How was your day?” she would respond like the dutiful wife.

“Long.” Always long. Occasionally fine. Rarely anything more specific than that.

“Your food is in the microwave. Three minutes.”

“You didn’t have to—”

“Three minutes, Emeka.”

She would never forget the period she had chosen to welcome him at the door when he had returned home and he had looked at her as if she had grown a second head. Ah! That day was the second most embarrassing moment she had. You already know the first one. He stood in the doorway waiting for her to step back so he could walk in. Adaeze had realized he didn’t like it. So she never tried again after the second time.

He would eat. She would sit across from him sometimes, or stand at the counter with her mug of tea in hand, and would ask questions and he would answer them and the answers would be complete and courteous and would tell her nothing about the interior life of the man giving them.

One evening, around the second month, she had tried a different approach.

“Tell me something that happened today,” she said. “Not a summary. Something specific.”

He looked up from his food. “What do you mean?”

“I mean—one moment. Something you noticed. Something that was interesting or strange or that made you think of something else.” She looked at him. “Something real.” she almost begged.

He was quiet for a moment.

“There was a junior analyst,” he said slowly, “who made an error in a model that nobody caught for three days. When we found it the numbers had already gone to the client.”

“What happened?

“We fixed it. Apologized. The client was—they weren’t happy.”

“What happened to the analyst?”

“He was spoken to.”

“Were you hard on him?”

Emeka considered this. “I was clear with him.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

He looked at her. “No,” he said after a moment. “I suppose it isn’t.”

She looked back at him. This was something—this small exchange, this half-open door. She did not push it further. She had learned early, that pushing doors in this marriage tended to close them.

“More water?” she asked.

“Please,” he said.

She filled his glass and held on to this memory for times when she needed anything that gave her reason to continue.

*******************

On weekends he went to his parents’ house on Saturday afternoons and to church on Sunday mornings. She went to both because she was his wife and because she had been going to that church since before she could drive herself there — since she was a girl in the congregation beside her mother, since before Emeka had come back from his masters abroad with something different and unspoken living behind his eyes.

Pastor Ejuka would look at them from the pulpit sometimes — his son and his son’s wife, sitting in the third row on the right side where the Ejuka family had always sat — and he would smile the smile of a man whose architecture is holding.

Nobody looked closely enough to see the cracks.

One Sunday, driving home from church, she looked out the window and said: “Your father preached well today.”

“He always does.”

“The part about the house built on rock.” She paused. “He looked at us when he said it.”

Emeka was quiet for a moment. “He looks at everyone.”

“He looked at us specifically.” Adaeze insisted.

“Ada.” His voice was gentle and final in equal measure. “He was preaching.”

She turned back to the window.

“I know,” she said.

They drove the rest of the way home in silence.

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*******************

They were polite to each other.

This was, Adaeze had concluded, the most exhausting thing about her marriage. Not the distance — she had half-prepared herself for a slow beginning, had told herself warmth could be cultivated in small increments. What she had not prepared for was the relentlessness of the politeness.

The way it never dropped.

The way Emeka was never unkind, never careless, never anything she could point to and say: there, that specific thing, that is the problem.

He asked about her day with what appeared to be genuine interest.

He listened to her answers like he was really interested.

He remembered the things that mattered — that she didn’t like pepper in her eggs, that she preferred the left side of the bed, that she had a complicated relationship with her younger brother that she preferred not to examine closely in conversation. He was considerate in the way that a very good colleague is considerate. The way someone is considerate when they respect you but do not love you.

She had started noticing the difference between the two.

Respect says how was your day. Love wants to know the answer before you give it.

Respect passes the salt. Love notices you are about to reach for it.

Respect shares a bed. Love makes a bed feel different from every other place in the world.

What was the good thing about this marriage to her? She had begun to reason all of the good in this was for Emeka alone. Nothing for her. Her family’s money may have boosted the church’s economy. Her parents devotion to the community sometimes made her feel stuck. All the “keeping herself for marriage” did not even guarantee her a good marriage. This was a joyless marriage.

She lay in their bed most nights and listened to him breathe and turned these distinctions over in her mind, pressing them like a bruise to see where the tenderness was, until the pressing tired her into sleep.

*******************

Her work, at least, was entirely hers.

She was a QA analyst — a job she had come to through genuine aptitude and the particular satisfaction of finding errors that other people had missed.

She didn’t need to work a 9-5 as she was already made for life from her grand-father’s sesame oil processing business. She had thought about opening a clothing store somewhere on Admiralty Way but had not gotten her self to looking for spaces. The job was just to spend time and she liked it. She had the kind of mind that tracked systems with patient attention and identified the precise point at which something had gone wrong before the wrong thing had a chance to become a failure.

She did not turn this mind off at six fifty-three in the morning.

She thought about this sometimes — the professional irony of it. She spent her working hours identifying flaws in systems with cheerful precision and then came home and applied the same precision to the flaw at the centre of her marriage and then chose, daily, to file the findings and say nothing.

It was not denial. She was too honest with herself for denial.

It was hope. Dressed in patience. Wearing the clothes of contentment. But underneath — persistent, sometimes exhausting hope.

Her colleague, Uzezi, whose desk was beside hers at work knew her well enough to notice things, had said to her once, about four months into the marriage: “You seem tired.”

“Work is busy,” Adaeze said.

“Not that kind of tired.” Uzezi looked at her with the careful eyes of a woman who had been married for years. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Adaeze said.

“Marriage fine or actually fine?”

Adaeze looked at her screen. “ Can those be the same thing?”

Uzezi was quiet for a moment. Then: “Sometimes. Not always.” She paused. “You know where I am.”

“I know,” Adaeze had replied.

The conversation did not continue.

************************

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Then came the miscarriage.

She would not speak of it in detail, even to herself — not on the bathroom floor that Thursday morning and not in the weeks that followed. She would give it its clinical name and its clinical facts. Nine weeks. A Thursday. A hospital that was clean and kind in the impersonal way of places that dealt with this regularly.

She had called him from the bathroom floor.

“Emeka.”

“Ada? What’s wrong—”

“I need you to come home.” Her voice was completely steady. Adaeze, even when things were falling apart sounded like someone who had things under control, and she had long since stopped being able to tell whether this was strength or a form of loneliness she had developed.

“What happened? Are you—”

“I just need you to come home. Please.”

He had come immediately, arrived within twelve minutes, found her sitting on the edge of the bed, she looked like she just had a bath. she pointed at the bathroom door. He walked over to the bathroom and saw a blood-soaked dress gathered by the bath tub with traces of blood following the gathering. He wondered if it was her period.

Adaeze had known she was pregnant but never wanted to share it with Emeka. She wanted him to find out himself when her tummy began to protrude. She had hoped it would bring some level of closeness between them or that at least, he would be interested in conversing with her and the baby.

“Did you have a painful period?” He came back out of the bathroom to ask her.

She shook her head. Her eyes beginning to water.

“What happened?” He didn’t know what she wanted from him.

Ada began to weep. She couldn’t hold this emotion in anymore.

“Hospital. Now.” he offered. Was it possible that Ada was pregnant and I didn’t know? Did she lose the baby? He tried to pull her up to her feet, then carried her downstairs, to his car and drove to the hospital.

She had stopped weeping now, her breathing had also calmed. She sat up in the back seat where he had placed her to lie.

He glanced in the rearview mirror at her red, swollen face, and said: “Talk to me.”

She was quiet.

“Ada—”

“I’m fine, Emeka. I don’t want to talk. Just drive.” she was angry now. Why did he care? He had been silent all these months, now he wants to show care. Too late. She only knew she needed him here. She knew she had lost the baby. No room for hope anymore.

He drove.

At the hospital he held her hand. He spoke to the doctor. He handled everything with the competent, careful attention he brought to all difficult tasks.

She had looked at his hand holding hers and thought two things at the same time: He is here handling this and I am still alone. I don’t feel him with me. I still feel like I am by myself.

Both things were true at the same time and the space between them was still there.

Afterward, in the car going home, he said. “We don’t have to talk about it now.”

“Good.” She said. “Because I don’t want to.” He didn’t even notice she was sad and angry at the same time. Sad at the loss of their baby and angry that it took Emeka too long to show some care and affection until today.

“Okay.”

“Just take me home.”

“Okay, Ada”

“And I don’t want anyone to know. Not yet. Not our parents, not—”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” She turned and looked at him. Just for a moment. Long enough for him to see something in her face that she did not usually let him see. Anger.

He turned to the road. “Yes,” he said quietly.. “I understand.”

She turned back to the window.

She did not cry in the car until she was back in the bathroom with the door closed and the tap running to drown out the sound of her sobs. She was not fine.

She had lost a baby that nobody outside the hospital had known about and she had grieved it in private because her husband didn’t know how to grieve with her. She wanted that baby with the fierceness that had surprised her because a baby would have been someone in this house who would have loved her without negotiation. Someone whose love she would not have to earn or wait for or hope into existence.

She had lost that.

Two days later, he came to the bedroom doorway while she was reading.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. He tried to connect with her.

“Better.” she said. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“I know.”

He stood in the doorway. He looked like a man who had something else to say and was trying to find it.

“Ada—”

“I’m okay, Emeka.” She looked at him steadily. “Really. These things happen. The doctor said there’s no reason—” she paused, “—no reason it would happen again. We’re fine.”

We’re fine.

He looked at her for a long moment. she seemed to no longer want his presence.

“Okay.” he said.

He went back down the stairs.

She looked at the page of her book. She had not read a single word of it since he appeared in the doorway. She closed it and stared at the ceiling.

We’re fine, she had said.

Because his half-hearted comfort felt worse than no comfort at all. She would rather carry it alone in dignity than carry it with him in the loneliness of a comfort that did not reach her.

She put her book on the bedside table.

She turned off the light and lay in the dark, letting herself feel and then she stopped feeling it and went to sleep because she had work in the morning.

***************

Outside, the garden was changing.

It had been lush on the night they arrived — full and green and carefully arranged. But somewhere in the months that followed, without anyone deciding it, the garden had begun to lose something. The border flowers thinned. The lawn developed dry patches in the corners. The frangipani tree stood as it always had but the growth around it had slowed, become straggly in places, less certain of itself.

The gardener still came on Thursdays. The sprinkler system still ran.

But a garden knows the difference between maintenance and attention. Between someone doing the correct things and someone actually caring what grows.

It knew.

**************

The second year arrived the way the second year of anything difficult arrives, with a familiar weight. They had stopped pretending about the weekends. He did his things. She did hers. They met at the dinner table when schedules allowed and talked about reasonable topics and then parted to their separate silences like a tide retreating from a shore it had never quite reached.

They were roommates who had once stood before God and witnesses and promised otherwise.

She had started dreaming about leaving. Yes. Leaving.

Not planning. Not yet. Just dreaming — the way you dream about a life before you are brave enough to believe it is available to you. She would imagine a small apartment entirely hers, far away from here, far from her family and friends, starting a new life somewhere far in the north, like Jigawa, and in the dream she always stood at the window of it and felt something she had almost forgotten the name of.

Relief.

She would wake and lie still while the master bedroom reassembled itself around her — the good furniture, the correct address, everything chosen carefully.

She would listen to Emeka breathe.

I am just twenty-six years old, she would think, and I am dreaming about escape.

And then she would get up and make breakfast and the gate would slide open at six fifty-three and the house would go quiet and she would sit with her tea in the kitchen and the loneliness of a woman who is not alone.

Outside the window the garden waited in the morning light.

Thin in the borders. Dry in the corners. The frangipani tree patient and unblossomed.

Waiting for someone to actually want it.

— Neither of them was ready to want anything yet. But something was coming that would force them both to stop pretending they didn’t.

Olubunmi’s Note: As Adaeze moves toward the end of the second year, I want to ask you something. Do you think Adaeze should speak to someone about her failing marriage? Do you think they should both see a marriage counsellor? Is she the one with the problem or is it Emeka who has issues? Should she just run to Jigawa? Please share your thoughts.

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To Catch up on The Long Way Round series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, Episode 3 here.

With Love…

See Episode 5 here

They were never friends at the university.

One liked to read, go to church and speak politely to people, the other barely read, went to church sometimes and faffed around a lot.

I wonder why I am writing in 3rd person.

This is my story.

Many years ago, when I resumed 200level, I was in a separate hostel than the one I had started in. I had made friends now and secured new roommates among the girls I had known from the 100level.

One time, while walking with my friends back to the hostel from class, one friend had said: “That girl, the one walking with the other one, She’s on First Class.” I looked. I saw this very beautiful young lady, modest in dressing, modest in speaking, always soft spoken and I admired her. I wanted to be like her so much. What would it be like to be by her side? walk with her? be smart like her? First Class was also our goal in life. lol

She was in 300 level and had a clean record of A’s, strong standing in First Class and here I was struggling to have a strong 2.1. I noticed she was also one of the girls to stay out of trouble, unlike me who would carry mine and my friends problems on my head and fight for them. I didn’t like that she was quiet. I felt she was too quiet. I also didn’t like that she was ‘too serious’ with church. I felt her standards were too high after watching her for sometime, but I still liked her. She was beautiful and Intelligent and a good Christian girl, wife material (triple edged sword).

After a while, I started longing to be her friend. She was excellent. I knew I needed to be more serious to really get the results she was getting. work hard, stay focused on a goal, follow God, etc, but I was very distracted. When she got to 400 level and graduated with a First Class, I was proud of her. We never spoke in the university but we knew each other. We could have been friends of each other’s roommates.

Years later, on my first day at work, Guess who I see? Her!!!

She walked up to me and asked if I went to ** University. I replied in the affirmative, beaming with internal joy. Here we are again. It wasn’t even something I had planned.

Over the years, I have seen her grow and lead and I’m proud that I get to be around her.

When I think about the longing I had in my heart many years ago, I know that God is ready to help me get there. I only have to align. I know that it is by the grace of God that I am where I am today.

This picture was taken by another colleague in the office and she doesn’t know how many emotions this image stirs in me.

I am very grateful to God. I have lived in my heart’s longing, I have grown, I have learned and I know that the Psalm of David was answered: (“May he give you the desire of your heart and make all your plans succeed.” Psalms‬ ‭20‬:‭4‬ ‭NIV‬‬) in my life, many years ago, I just didn’t realize.

For anyone of you having a longing in your heart, don’t think so hard about it. Don’t worry about it. You can speak to God about it and leave it alone.

Surely, Soon, it will come to pass.

If this touched your stony heart, share this message.

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I have been thinking about this a lot lately, the difference between making something and building something. The difference between a film that sells out every cinema in Lagos and Abuja at Christmas and a film that people are still talking about three years later. About why I will always go back and rewatch a Kemi Adetiba film but struggle to remember the plot of something released six months ago by someone else.

I want to talk about Nigerian cinema. Not to tear it down o! There is enough of that on the internet already. But because I love it, because I believe in what it could be and as someone who is building something in this space, I think this conversation matters.

What Kemi Adetiba understands that most people don’t.

If you have watched The Wedding Party, King of Boys, King of Boys: The Return, or To Kill A Monkey, you already know what I am talking about. They are not safe or soft stories designed to make you comfortable. They are designed to make you feel emotions so strongly that you cannot look away, and even if you do, you will turn back. What is the opposite of ‘away’? You will turn ‘around’.

Take “To Kill A Monkey”. Efe is a man so docile, so paralysed by fear and poverty, that you want to reach through the screen and beat him, Like are you not living inside Lagos? You are inside Keke and you cannot jump down? Keke that you will just shake and everything will scatter? Only you and one person. 1 person and you no even try fight? And Oboz(Obozhuiomwen) — hot-tempered, low-class rich, a ticking time bomb who cannot control the emotions that his money has amplified — is the kind of villain you understand completely even as you despise him. These two characters sit at opposite extremes of what they represent, and Kemi holds them both with precision and honesty. The visuals are immaculate. The performances are earned. Nothing is lazy. Nothing is rushed.

You will rarely see Kemi Adetiba dancing on social media to promote a new film. She does not release something every Christmas to catch holiday spending. She sits still. She plans. She plots. And when she finally releases — it lands on Netflix and stays there, in conversations, in people’s minds, in lists of the best African cinema. Her audience does not need to be persuaded to show up. They are already waiting.

She is not building an audience. She is building devotees.

That is the standard I am holding myself to with the Creative City. Not volume or speed or seasonal releases timed to school holidays. Excellence that outlives the moment it was made.

Let’s talk about the gap that nobody is filling.

Right now, this is what I keep thinking about: Nigeria has produced some of the most extraordinary human stories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Stories of empire-building, of reinvention, of failure and recovery, of quiet ambition executed over decades. Stories that would make American audiences sit in silence for two hours and leave the cinema changed.

We have not told them.

America made Self Made — the story of Madam C.J. Walker, a Black woman who built a haircare empire from nothing in the early 1900s and became the first female self-made millionaire in the United States. It was not just a business story. It was a story about what a woman does when the world tells her she cannot. It was woman power on screen in the most powerful way possible. It moved people. It changed how people saw themselves.

Nigeria has those stories. We have men and women who have built conglomerates from the dust of a single idea, who have acquired companies across continents, who have employed tens of thousands of people and fed nations. We have founders who grew up watching their communities shaped by agriculture, who went and studied it, came back, and patiently built empires rooted in the same soil their parents farmed.

I work for one of them.

I have sat in meetings and watched what quiet, strategic, patient empire-building looks like from the inside. I have seen what it takes to grow a single company into a conglomerate that now spans multiple countries, employs over twenty thousand people, and continues to expand its reach beyond the shores of Nigeria. I cannot tell you what I have seen in those rooms. But I can tell you this: it is cinematic. It is the kind of story that, told correctly, would make a Nigerian in the audience sit up straight and think: I am capable of this. I am limitless.

That feeling of knowing your own ability to make things happen — is what great cinema gives people. It is what Self Made gave women who watched it. It is what King of Boys gave women who had never seen a character like Eniola Salami on a Nigerian screen before.

It is what Nigerian cinema is capable of giving an entire generation, if we choose to tell the right stories with the right standard.

On the ecosystem that already exists.

There are Nigerian filmmakers who have done something extraordinarily difficult: they have trained Nigerian audiences to go to the cinema. They have built the habit. They have proven that Nollywood can sell out screens across every location and generate serious revenue. That infrastructure matters. You cannot have the stories I am dreaming about without an audience that has already learned to show up. That foundation is real and it deserves recognition.

But there is a difference between building an audience and feeding a hunger. And I think there is a hunger in Nigeria right now — particularly among a growing, educated, globally aware middle class — for stories that go deeper. Stories that do not just entertain but challenge. The ones that don’t just make you laugh on Christmas Day but stay with you into the new year and change how you see yourself and your country.

That hunger is not being fed consistently. And that gap is an opportunity.

What the Creative City is being built to do.

I am not building the Creative City to compete with what already exists. I am building it to tell the stories that do not yet exist on screen.

The Nigerian man who started with nothing and built a continent-spanning empire. The Nigerian woman who chose her purpose over her comfort and found both. The stories of our streets, our boardrooms, our careers, our kitchens, our faith, our fury, our tenderness. African stories told with the visual excellence, the character depth, and the emotional precision that Kemi Adetiba has shown us is possible.

Not rushed or seasonal or designed primarily to sell out December cinemas.

Designed to last.

The Creative City is being built for the deep thinkers. For the people who are hungry for stories that do not insult their intelligence. For the Nigerian audience that already exists and is waiting — the way Kemi Adetiba’s audience waits — for something worthy of their attention.

Excellence lasts. I intend to build something that lasts.

Nigeria has the stories. We are building the infrastructure to tell them.

If this post made you think of a Nigerian story that deserves to be on screen — a person, a moment, a life — I would love to hear it in the comments. The Creative City is still being built. Every story you name is a brick. Let’s do it together.

With love and intention,

Olubunmi

Storyteller. Builder. Daughter of Africa.

Post 5 of ∞

Emeka stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of the master bedroom, looking out at the garden downstairs in the early morning.

The garden seemed more fake than real at this hour — the pale outline of the patio where Adaeze had planned to host future guests, the shapes of the bordered plants, the leaves that had dropped after yesterday’s sweep by the gardener, the frangipani tree standing perfectly still in the windless night. Everything placed. Everything waiting for human touch.

He heard the shower stop. Adaeze was most likely done.

He didn’t move from the window.

The night before had been — he searched for the word and found only the word fine. It had been fine. Adaeze had been gentle and willing and he had been present enough, he told himself. He had been kind. He had not been cruel. He had not been elsewhere — not entirely. Not consistently.

But he had kept his eyes closed for most of it.

And in the spaces behind his closed eyes, without invitation or permission, Lola had been there.

It wasn’t a memory but a presence. Lola’s presence. The essence of her—the directness, the laugh, the way she had looked at him across a kitchen counter and said I think I might actually like you like it was the most ordinary thing in the world and that had undone him completely.

He pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the floor-to-ceiling window.

He had heard the term soul tie preached in church more than once by his father.

He didn’t know he had started absorbing her. He could see Lola in himself now—in the way he could not fully commit to someone he had chosen to stay with or even married, the way he held himself at a comfortable distance from the very life he was building. Lola had done this to him. Or rather, he had learned it from watching her do it to him and somewhere along the way, it had become his own habit. She had been unable to fully choose him, and here he was, unable to fully choose Adaeze.

He remembered what she had given him. He still had the pair of socks Lola had gifted him on his birthday—years ago now, worn through at the heels, holes in both big toes—and he had never been able to throw them away. He couldn’t bring himself to throwing them away. They were at the back and bottom of his socks drawer. In his marital home. He had placed then there days before the wedding.

When two people come together outside of the covenant of marriage, his father had said, they do not simply separate afterward. They leave parts of themselves with each other. And those parts do not come back just because you decide you are ready to move on with someone else.

He understood the sermon now, specifically.

He had given Lola parts of himself that he had not known he was giving—parts of his imagination, parts of his longing—and when she had said ‘no’ and married someone else, those parts had not come back to him. They had stayed with her, in another continent, with another man, in a life he was not part of.

And now he was standing at the window of his marital home on the morning after his wedding night and Lola was in every space behind his closed eyes without asking to be there.

This is what his father had been describing from the pulpit.

And soul ties, Pastor Ejuka had said, do not break themselves. They have to be broken—deliberately, prayerfully, with the full understanding of what you are asking God to sever.

Right now, Emeka didn’t feel like praying, even when he knew that the woman in his bathroom had given him everything and he was standing here thinking about someone else. He gave himself the only thing he had —the instruction. The command. The voice that sounded like his father’s but was his own.

This is your life now.

He used the firmness he reserved for when he needed himself to listen.

This is what you chose. This woman in the bathroom is your wife. You said Yes yesterday before God and man. You chose her. You will be present for her. You will build something real here. You are your father’s son and your father’s son does not run from what he has committed to.

The garden outside was very still in the pre-dawn.

He looked at it and laughed a wicked laugh.

***********************

In the en-suite bathroom, Adaeze stood in front of the lighted mirror.

She was wearing the cream silk slip that Aunty Ngozi had pressed into her hands a week before, at the bridal shower with a whisper that ‘a wife must never let herself become invisible in her own bedroom’. Her friends had laughed and clapped and someone had played a song and the whole afternoon had been full of the warm, slightly coded wisdom of married women preparing an unmarried one for what was ahead.

She had laughed too. She had written the instructions in her heart.

Now she stood in the mirror and looked at herself honestly.

She was beautiful — she knew this not from vanity but from the plain registry of twenty-five years of other people’s reactions. Good skin, her mother’s cheekbones, the kind of figure that made her female relatives nod with quiet satisfaction.

She had kept herself — all of herself, every part that could be kept — for her husband. For Emeka specifically. For last night.

Last night had not been what she expected.

She couldn’t have named precisely what she had expected.

The older women had spoken in metaphors and her married friends in euphemisms and neither had prepared her for the specific quality of what she had felt — which was not pain exactly, and not disappointment exactly, but something more quietly disorienting than either.

The feeling of being received correctly without being wanted completely.

She could feel the difference between the two. She had not known she would be able to. But she could.

Stop it, she told herself firmly. It was the first time. For both of you in this way. These things find their shape with time. Her mother said so. Patience, Adaeze. You have always been good at patience. A little more will not break you.

She thought about what Aunty Ngozi’s had whispered at the bridal shower. She thought about Chisom, married four years, pulling her aside the week before the wedding.

Can I tell you something honestly? Chisom had said.

Please, Adaeze responded.

The first time is almost never what you think it will be. Not because anything is wrong. Just because you are two people who are new to each other in this specific way and newness is always awkward before it is anything else. She had squeezed her hand. Don’t measure your marriage by the first night. That is not a fair test for anyone.

What if it stays awkward? Adaeze had asked.

It doesn’t, Chisom had said. It changes. Just keep showing up.

She was good at showing up.

She had been showing up for Emeka for the years before he had travelled, three years he was away—the quarterly calls, the warm check-ins, the steady, patient presence of a woman who understood that keeping a line open was its own kind of love. And for the fourteen months between when he came back and now, their first morning as a married couple.

She adjusted the slip and took one slow breath.

She opened the bathroom door and walked into the bedroom.

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****************

Emeka turned from the window.

She was standing in the light from the doorway in the cream slip, her hair down, the expensive body lotion she had unpacked the night before warm on her skin. She looked — he registered this in the careful, contained way of a man trying not to complicate things with too much examination — like exactly the kind of woman his father described from the pulpit when he read from Proverbs 31.

Present. Prepared. Worthy.

She kept herself for you, something said quietly in the back of his mind. For you specifically. Do you understand what that means?

“Good morning,” he said, nudging his conscience to the back of his thoughts.

— go to him, don’t wait for him to come. Chisom’s voice echoed in Adaeze’s mind. The first weeks are awkward for everyone, just keep showing up, it changes.

“Good morning.” Her smile was real — he could see that, he had always been able to read Adaeze’s real smiles from the performed ones — and somehow it would have been easier for him to receive a performed one than this real one.

He could hear his heart beat fast.

She came toward him slowly, with the deliberateness of someone who had thought about this and was now inside the thought, and she placed her hands on his chest and looked up at him. Her eyes were warm and slightly uncertain and entirely, completely his.

He put his arms around her because he felt that was the right thing to do, then he looked over her head at the garden outside — the border plants catching the first grey light of the dawn beginning, the frangipani tree standing perfectly still in its corner.

She decided to press her face against his chest to inhale his cologne.

She could feel his heartbeat.

It was steady and fast. The heartbeat of a man whose mind was elsewhere, beating on calmly without him.

She closed her eyes and held on to listening to the beat. Was it because of her?

After a moment she tilted her head up and looked at him.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I can make something. It’s our first morning together.

He looked down at her. Something moved across his face — a flicker of something she was not sure of. It wasn’t warmth or coldness. It seemed like humor or mockery or something in between that was harder for her to read.

“I’m going to shower,” he said, removing his hands from her waist. He wondered why she was trying so hard to please him. They were married now, no need for performances.

She blinked, shocked by his sudden change in emotions. “Oh. Okay. I’ll—”

“You don’t have to make anything. I will get something later.” He insisted, stepping away from her.

He didn’t want to continue the connection.

It felt forced. He left her standing there and walked out the bedroom. Their parents plan was for both of them to get married. That was done. He really didn’t think there was any need to act ‘intimate’.

Adaeze stood still by the floor-length window of their bedroom and watched him move away, almost ashamed of herself. She immediately turned to face the window, hugging herself.

The door closed behind him with a soft, final click and she stood where he had left her.

She did not move for a moment, her chest feeling heavy.

She looked at the space where he had been standing. Pensive. She turned again to look at the garden outside the window—lush and full and perfectly arranged in the early morning light.

She thought about Chisom’s voice again: the first time is almost never what you think it will be.

She thought about Aunty Ngozi: a wife must never let herself become invisible in her own bedroom.

She thought about the heartbeat she had pressed her ear to two minutes ago that had been going on without its owner.

She looked at the bathroom door.

Then she straightened her back —the precise, deliberate straightening of a woman who has absorbed something and decided not to show that it landed—and she picked up her robe from the chair beside the window and put it on. She walked out of the master bedroom and down the stairs.

She was going to make herself breakfast.

No pepper.

********************

Downstairs in the kitchen, she cracked two eggs into a bowl.

The kitchen was beautiful—she had chosen the fittings herself, standing in a showroom on a Saturday afternoon imagining the morning that would happen here. She was living in that imagination now, although she had imagined them with a specific quality of warmth and a man who was glad to be in them.

She cracked a third egg.

It was the first time, she reminded herself. It changes. Just keep showing up.

She had been showing up for this man for many years.

She whisked and seasoned the eggs the way she liked them—no pepper, a little thyme, the way her mother had always made them—and she ate alone at the kitchen island in the early morning of the first day of her marriage. She looked out the window at the garden—the garden had become her default view—with the careful precision of a woman who notices things and files them away:

He left me standing there. She did not say this aloud. After frying the eggs, she ate them, washed the plate and looked out the garden one more time.

By December, she thought. The frangipani blooms by December. I’ll give it until December. I’ll give it everything I have. Was this for the garden or for her life?

She placed the clean plate back in the rack, then stood in her beautiful kitchen in her beautiful house and breathed in slowly.

Outside, the garden stood in the full morning light—lush and arranged and full, every plant exactly where the landscaper had placed it.

Placed carefully and waiting for human touch.

**************************

Then later, when he came downstairs and found her sitting at the island with a cup of tea, he looked at the clean plate in the rack and understood she had already eaten alone and he said nothing about it.

She said nothing about it either. If he was hungry, he would get himself something.

“Morning,” he said again, going to the coffee machine.

“Morning.” she responded. “Did you not sleep well?”

“I slept well. You?” in a flat tone showing Adaeze he didn’t want to indulge in a conversation with her.

“Fine.” she noted.

The coffee machine did its work.

He grabbed his coffee cup and stood at the edge of the counter and they were two people in a kitchen on the first morning of their marriage. This was the morning where their conversations arrived at fine.

She looked at her tea when she noticed his eyes were glancing in her direction.

He immediately turned back to look at his coffee.

“I thought we could see the garden properly today,” she said to lessen the stiffness in the room. Emeka was too stiff. She didn’t know him like this before. “In the daylight.”

She knew he wasn’t shy, he just had never been nasty like the other men she had met. He was too formal for her liking. They were now husband and wife for god’s sake.

“Sure.” he said.

“And the market. Stock the house.” She was trying to make sure that conversation went beyond two syllabic responses from him.

“Okay.”

“Make it feel like somewhere people live.” she continued.

He glanced at her, there was something in the way she said it. “It will,” he assured her.

“I know,” she said. “Not yet, But it will.”

He looked at her and she looked back and for a moment they were looking at each other in their kitchen—seeing each other clearly, perhaps for the first time since the wedding, without the performance of the occasion between them.

She was the first to look away.

“Drink your coffee,” she said “We have a lot to do today.”

He drank his coffee.

She drank her tea.

Outside, the garden waited in the morning light, and inside the kitchen, the first silence of their marriage settled between them—not comfortable yet, not terrible, just the silence of two people learning whether they could sit inside it together.

They were learning.

The answer was not yet clear.

— But the garden knew. The garden always knows.

To Catch up on The Long Way Round series, Read the Introduction here, Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here.

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Episode 4 here.

I want to see your thoughts on this episode. Put it in the comments.

With Love…